


Never Quarantine the Past

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Lie Low At Lupin's, Second War with Voldemort, Shippy Gen, very shippy gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 20:39:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10974924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: Summer, 1995. A doomed grail quest and a series of near-misses in a station wagon.





	Never Quarantine the Past

Somewhere in the Pennines he realized he was alive again. He hadn’t thought too much about it until he was at Remus’s front door one night in late June, a few days after the nightmare events at Hogwarts—bloodless black-eyed new moon, his bruised shins in his cuffed jeans under the porchlight, the Somerset fog hanging thick like a curse, making him shiver, making him run faster through the summer moors—but when he’d lifted a hand to knock, he recognized his breathing body for the first time: that somewhere along the trip south his cracked thirty-five-year-old heart had stuttered and expanded and started to beat for the first time in fourteen years with something that wasn’t dread, or not only. Briefly and maybe mercifully he considered a heart attack or some kind of horrific plague from eating too many rats on the narrow night-flight down south, but it took seeing Remus’s oldyoung face at the threshold lit up with the dusty yellow lamp-flare in the living room for Sirius to realize it was a kind of hunger, sharper than a bone shard, finer than any trigger. There were blisters on his feet worn bloody from every mile he’d ever put between them, yearning every stinging step for Remus Remus Remus the same way he’d yearned for the watercolor patch of sky he could see from his cell in Azkaban, folded into his heart-meat like a lover’s face in a locket. He wanted to crawl inside of Remus in the doorway like being unborn and never come out almost as much as he never wanted to see him again.

For three days he slept miserably on the couch and then spent two outside cradled in the warm palm of the earth beneath the burgeoning moon, picking at the dead leggy stalks in the garden Remus hadn’t touched since the last renters had taken off a few years ago, feeling sorry for himself. Most mornings he put on the dog and walked three miles downhill into town where people fed him scraps outside the bakery and coaxed him into the occasional belly rub, which was altogether preferable to sharing the matchbox-sized cottage with Remus, where he ran headlong into some spectre of memory nearly hourly with a strange underwater drift through the years that left him unsure whether he was seventeen or twenty-eight or thirty-five or seventy or whether it even mattered. Age had grown over him. Looking in the bathroom mirror made him think of aerial photographs of environmental wounds left after the First World War, green blooming over gouged-out fault lines, skeletons of forests burnt and unhealed where nothing grew; he had been drained of magic and drained of self and drained of history like a hard candy sucked dry for twelve years such that when he tried to smile at his reflection with his hair newly cut all he could think of was a dead tree falling, a ship strangled in its own sails. Bomb-test scars in the desert like a shrill screaming void. After a few days he stopped trying to reconcile the image with his mind and his mind with his body and rehearsed his movements in the dark where he felt less like a chasm imitating a person, at least until he had to face Remus in the morning.

Searching for evidence that it had truly been fourteen years and not two weeks or a century he waited until Remus was out getting cigarettes in town and snuck back into the house, looking through the sparse fossil collection strung across his bedroom like a breadcrumb trail plucked from the fabric of the years, a hungry thief gorging himself on photos of mountains and the grainy cutout shapes of nocturnal creatures and a few unfamiliar faces, running his fingers over the Hudson Bay blanket on the bed, watching Remus drink retsina in a framed photo with a man he didn’t recognize, dark-haired and smiling, thunderstorm eyes, their thighs touching on the rocks. On the kitchen counter he’d found a recent letter from someone in Leeds and read just below the crease in the parchment down to the signature— _Will be in St. Ives in August, let me know if you want to (I know you want to)_ —which had instilled in him an unwarranted and smoldering jealousy as he stared out at the fluid curve of the horizon in the brittle dusk wondering if he was the same man in the photo, wondering whether Remus had left it out on purpose the way he’d sometimes done in another life, to see whether Sirius still had a beating heart to be struck one way or another.

Perhaps related to all the wallowing he suspected occasionally with a cold needling twinge that Dumbledore knew certain things about him, or both of them, and thus had sent Sirius here instead of letting him lick his metaphysical wounds at Mrs. Figg’s or Shacklebolt’s because he and Remus were clearly in need of some more psychological torture inflicted by each other’s hands; maybe it provided unique insight into war-wrought emotional obliteration, or maybe it was just fucking funny. After he’d been there for about a week Remus had tried to apologize, ostensibly for everything but mainly for letting the rat escape; _I’m sure you must think it’s my fault_ , he’d said, not looking at Sirius and as ever putting the onus of being a terrible fucking human being entirely on him rather than accept a subatomic particle of responsibility, which it seemed he hadn’t learned in the interim. At his worst Sirius _had_ in fact entertained the idea that it was all Remus’s fault, that he’d have Harry and regular meals and indoor plumbing if Remus had taken two seconds to think on that night last June—that day in November, or August or March of ’81, that umbilical tether from which everything else had first begun to rust and rot—before every hope he’d ever hung onto, blind and starved, disappeared into the nighttime quiet with the rat the rat the rat the rat, rattling around his head like a record skipping, poison spilled and festering. So of course he told Remus that it was alright, who could say how it would’ve gone, that it didn’t matter anymore, that it was his fault too and what good had casting blame around ever done them et cetera.

In his head it sounded chivalrous and in his gut it felt like it would give him serious indigestion but he knew it was true; besides, the whole thing was as close to an apology as Remus ever got, which was several hundred leagues from breaking the surface even when he really put his back into it, and now that Sirius had gotten it he wasn’t sure he wanted or deserved it. When he said it Remus had looked at him in the blue gloaming with the night winds murmuring in the curtains—that famished look, God, like he was twenty years old in the flat waiting on the couch all night for Sirius to come home, like he’d crawled barefoot across the ends of the earth like Sirius had wanting nothing more than to meet him in the middle and find his face in the doorway lit up with holy yearning, like they were made of the same majestic thing, drawn ineffably towards each other on golden strings—and then he’d laughed and laughed.

Another thing they had in common, Sirius supposed: all they could do was laugh, in the end.

It took a while but finally they started talking again, not especially about anything substantial or interesting and diving into the halcyon days pre-cataclysm was somewhat like navigating a minefield while simultaneously careening headfirst downhill, knowing they were both going to get hurt eventually and there was nothing they could do about it, and possibly it was long overdue anyway. Sirius told him haltingly about Azkaban, sticking his face as far as it would go out the window to watch the barges pass by with the searingly cold bars bracing against his cheeks, marking time with slanting shadows, the endless unremembering; sometimes Remus made a move like he was reaching for Sirius’s wrist or his knee on the couch but instead he’d grab the bottle of Ogden’s Old and talk about Bulgaria and Damascus and America and his assorted short-lived jobs trying covertly to get himself killed and shows he’d been to and sometimes after too much or not enough whiskey men he’d fucked. He had forced himself to eat all the life he’d lived but hardly tasted anything, Sirius thought, or only a small bit, a strange simulacrum of the way both of them had nearly stopped eating towards the end, not expecting to live out the year. Of course he resented it at times but mostly he wondered what it was like, being doomed to keep living—all your guts spread out in a centrifugal ley line back to everything you’d ever lost so that no matter where you went you could never tear your feet out of the riptide pulse of the past. Neither was much of a choice.

Humiliatingly he still jumped at any and all loud noises as if he’d been electrocuted, which was exactly what he did when the Floo crackled into life late in the afternoon and Dumbledore’s head blossomed in the hearth like fire on brimstone such that Sirius dropped the cassette he was holding ( _Tweez_ , which he had hardly taken out of Remus’s banged-up Walkman the last few days) and splintered the plastic case on the wood floor. Outside Remus was hanging his sheets and Sirius’s new thrift store jeans on the clothesline, sunlight in his mouth and his copper-green eyes.

“Glad to see you’re doing well,” said Dumbledore, which meant that two weeks of Remus’s mostly edible cooking—for some reason he kept insisting on elaborate dinners out of cookbooks that required spellwork he seemed barely able to perform—was putting meat back on his bones, though he hardly felt it. “And out of those prison robes, no less.”

He wondered if he could perform _Reparo_ wandlessly or if he’d shatter the house with too much magic or otherwise be unable to summon the flint and tinder of it like an impotent St. Mungo’s escapee; through the window he could see Remus hanging shirts in the backyard, throwing the colorful afghan he’d bought for Sirius across the line, and unbidden he remembered a play he’d read for seventh year Muggle Studies, _I have always depended on the kindness of strangers_ … “I remembered _Incendio_ ,” he said, “somewhere up north. Around the washlands, I think.”

“I take it our Mr. Lupin is out on business in town?”

Our Mr. Lupin. If Remus had ever belonged to anyone it wasn’t Sirius, though he supposed by now Remus was nominally more Dumbledore’s man by virtue of debt and the strangling iron chain of guilt he’d welded around his own neck and could be led around on like a leash. Since certain Events early in ‘81 he’d thought of Remus as beholden to nothing but the noose of the moon, to the ritual and the blood, to the tidal unbirth and the elemental unknowing, loyal only to the nocturnal heartbeat-song that he said hummed inaudibly to his lungs and his vein-lines like a bodily tinnitus. He wouldn’t realize until much later how doomed they were, when he could think a thing like that and make himself believe it, but at the time he was languishing miserably in a sort of wounded spiritual unmooring and so possessed by pain and stupidity in equal measures that he couldn’t see far beyond his own pathetic suffering and had not exactly tried very hard to escape his tunnel vision. When he forgot Remus’s face in Azkaban he would fall asleep freezing in the slant of moonlight that lanced in through the pinprick window and dreamed of being split open at the gut, blood flowing menstrual and ceaseless across his groin and his thighs, unable to reel himself in, forgetting and forgetting.

Even after the sea pushed him out onto the Northumberland coast and it all became very obvious he could hardly stand to think about it; it was almost too bright to look at for too long, like sun glinting off steel, and he dug his hands into the sand bloody with dusk for an anchor to the present and tried to find where it hurt. Joltingly he’d thought of his brother crying as he often did in his sickly childhood and one of their nursemaids rubbing his back in his bed, saying shhhh, shhhh, tell me where it hurts, but he had cried and cried and would not be comforted. Some people never knew where it hurt. Trying to connect one thing to another was like walking up an endless staircase and slipping on every name and face and the thunder-crush of every new memory; two and two equaled the moon and January ’81 and the Shrieking Shack and the Blacks’ collection of poisoned wine in the cellar. The image of a snake eating its tail came to mind. In the end there was never anything else to do but move with the pain and sleep with it and eat it and fuck it and walk around in it, and as ever that was what he did.

“He’s just outside,” said Sirius. Lately when Dumbledore was fixing him with that pinned-insect stare he got this funny musical drumbeat in his head the way he often did with snatches of songs and poetry, like the notes were being plucked out on his own spine but he couldn’t come up with the name; he’d sung it as well as he could for Remus one night while they were both completely hammered. “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” A while later he remembered the word he’d been looking for, _pizzicato_ , a word he’d learned as a child from one of his tutors and the name of the strange ganglion vibration playing on tiptoes across the sunburnt back of his neck. It was the third time he’d made Remus laugh since ’81. “Is everything—did something happen?”

“Undoubtedly. But nothing so dire at the moment that I would require any war hounds to jump into the fray, so to speak.”

Something about it stung but he pushed it back down into his knotted gut where he kept everything else. “Do I need to get Remus?”

“No need. I’m in no hurry,” said Dumbledore, “and you’ll find that this concerns you and your unique situation—and Remus’s, as well. I do hope it will give you an opportunity to stretch your legs, at the very least.”

“Is Harry—”

“Harry is with his aunt and uncle, where he is safe and where I daresay he will remain so,” said Dumbledore, watching him from the fireplace over the half-moon rim of his glasses with the kind of daggerpoint finality that said all too loudly not to ask for more. “Let’s wait for Remus and then discuss our arrangement, shall we? I know you must tire of hearing it, Sirius, but you really _do_ look well.”

The next morning they loaded up their things into Remus’s dented station wagon in the unfogging blue hush of dawn, the rainclouds gathering wooly grey gloom overhead as they shoved the tent into the trunk and Disillusioned the passenger’s side before they left to find a new safe house for the old war. They shared a thermos of coffee heavy with cream and listened to the morning Muggle news on the radio for all of twelve seconds—a rash of strange disappearances in Uxbridge, witnesses and family members with mysterious afflictions—before changing the station to one playing grunge of varying quality and then settling on a staticky college station when the first notes of something blaringly caustic with a kind of accusatory rasp grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tugged him backwards; it was a song from _Alien Lanes_ , Remus told him, which was one of the albums Sirius still hadn’t listened to. There would always be so much he hadn’t listened to.

Near Boscastle they stopped for gas and had greasy fish and chips wrapped in newspaper by the harbor where no one would see them walking along the nervous rocky ledge outside of town, watching the thunderstorm clouds darken until the rain peeled out of the sky across the wide green brim of the summer hills, electricity in it, and heat. In the car they sat listening to the staccato firecracker burst of it pounding the metal roof until the worst of it let up and Remus pulled onto the main road again where they drove for ten minutes before they had to pull over again in the blinding downpour haze, trying futilely to cast _Impervius_ on the windshield until Sirius gathered fire in his mind and spelled _Rennervate_ onto the straining wipers, coaxing them into frantic life with his forefinger. When at last it slowed they rolled down the windows and watched the lightning rolling away over the water, the world wide open and amazed, pulsing with life; in the wet fragrant breath of it pouring out across the land in a wash of fog he found something like an echo of spiritual recognition—that something brittle could be softened and made new again. To everything there was a season et cetera. He couldn’t see his reflection in the side mirror through the veil of magic, but when he turned around Remus was looking at him with rainwater in his hair, the radio turned down low murmuring a static hushhushhush, his mouth very soft, and when it got like this between them sometimes, like a still-life scene told in shadows and fever dreams—the once and future question, the exact coordinates of where every journey would end, the always-ache and the sometimes-fear—when their fractured, unhealed edges snagged on each other—and when the light hit them just right—

—

He’d visited the Levels a few times as a teenager during summers when he’d told his parents he would be staying with James and promptly took off—with or without James, and rarely with Peter, who usually spent the bulk of the holidays at his family’s summer home in Majorca—to see Remus in Somerset, where he lived in a cottage with its red moss-covered roof tucked against the sloping shoulder of a hill where the disused Lupin farmland spread out like a hand of cards laid flat, chickens roaming along the walk up to the crooked house where he knew as well as he knew the anticipatory matchflare of his own heart that Remus was watching from his bedroom window just where the morning glories climbed up the trellis and left off. They would take Muggle buses into Frome or Bath and come back late in the day, walking along the vast green sheet of the meadows at dusk, reading each other bullshit horoscopes in _The Quibbler_ or sharing a joint before walking up Glastonbury Tor, watching the land fan out in a veil of fog below where something always seemed to move out of the corner of his eye, just out of sight.

In dreams he was always climbing something when he wasn’t eating something, mountains and staircases and the walls of Azkaban in clichéd symbolic longing and/or rage, though it took him the better part of the summer months wandering the northern hills on newborn legs to remember the old one, the one where for hours he climbed the path up to Glastonbury Tor certain that someone was waiting for him in the tower at the very top. But there never was anything; only the eternity of the fall, only the vast waste land below, swallowing everything.

They spent the first two nights camped a few miles outside of Bleadon after surveying an old barn they’d used as a weapons cache late in the first war and then visiting an old Order adjacent near Taunton the next day, Sirius having taken Polyjuice provided by Dumbledore which turned him into an unwitting doppelganger of Snape in jeans and an extremely incongruous flannel, thus adding insult to injury to injustice and making him flinch from his reflection more than usual whenever he caught sight of it on accident. If he had had a wand he’d have tried to duel the old man but likely that was what he wanted, given that his completely avoidable status as England’s most wanted was apparently the punchline of some miserable ongoing cosmic joke no one would let him in on, or maybe it _was_ the joke. Once Remus was finished laughing—there were a few false starts, which was sweet in a perverse and dearly aggravating sort of way, his eyes crinkling until it started again like a coughing fit—they went to the grocery and bought plums and good bread and some cheese they spelled to keep and then set up the tent at the foot of a low hill with the last golden thimbleful of sunlight brimming over the fluid curve of the horizon, giving everything a hallowed gloaming-glow, the earth still womb-warm in the palm of the night. Outside the tent Remus was casting _Cave inimicum_ around the entire hill while Sirius cut two of the apples they’d scrumped from the old orchard near the cottage, remembering how Remus’s mother had sent them whole bushels when they were living together in London, in a dream.

He wasn’t used to this—being the one who had to be locked up and hidden away and talked about as if he wasn’t in the room like a brainless invalid, yet still expected to bleed when necessary for the very people who put him there in the first place. For the war that it seemed had always been slowly siphoning his soul from minute fucking one and would never stop until at long last all of his self was gone. A twenty-year kiss administered not by a dementor but a chemical reaction of time and circumstance lit like a fuse by some unseen hand long ago and wrapped in a noose around his neck, tightening so gently he didn’t notice until it was already too late. At his sentencing he remembered asking for Remus, so heavy with the sedative haze he hated to move and kept slurring his name (they had to calm him down, Dumbledore had explained, as two senior Aurors clamped the irons around his ankles and asked questions he hardly understood), Remus Remus Remus like a broken theremin thrum until all the meaning bled out of the name and at last Dumbledore told him with the same sparkling reproach he’d used when Sirius had landed himself in detention that he was to be sent to Azkaban that very day, that he would never again see Remus or Harry, that he would in fact die there and if he was smart he’d do it early; he never could remember whether the old man was munching a lemon drop or if his memory had filled in the holes with plausible tragicomedy. When he caught sight of the shore through the driving November snow in the boat, his stomach bottoming out with the sickening cold-water burst of the last flush of true clarity he would have for twelve years, he realized the genius of it all: an easy Judas, the shattering denouement just before the epilogue. Above all else the political expediency—the black Black sheep, returned to the fold at long last. Likely the only way it could have been any easier for them was if it had been Remus instead.

In the tent he stretched his legs and spread Remus’s huge wool blanket over their sleeping bags, which was emblazoned with the name of one of the American national parks in a far corner; he hadn’t talked much about America and said he’d only been there for about a year and a half in the late ‘80s on a research grant secured for him by none other than Dumbledore once Remus had deigned to answer his letters again. The old man’s propensity for throwing bones of varying palatability or hush money to those whose debts he required worked in tandem with Remus’s tendency to run away in the wake of cataclysms and/or after he’d fucked up massively, a pattern that had emerged at the tender age of twelve when Remus had tried to claw his way through all three of them in the dormitory after they told him they knew, the wild animal thing Sirius knew for the first time was his very soul blaring in his eyes and his skin and his bared teeth, his heartbeat under Sirius’s fingers drowning out everything except the strange wingbeat pulse that seemed to rub up against Sirius’s with a hellscape nightmare slamming he was starting to recognize: oh, he remembered thinking idiotically, it’s you, it’s you I’ve come all this way to find, it was always you, it’s going to be you. Even now Sirius was certain the only thing that had kept him in England immediately following last year’s Snafu was the searing umbilical guilt that weighed roughly ten tons; still they sometimes found it difficult to meet each other’s eyes for long.

It was another thing they had in common now: a skittish and nerveless paralysis where anything concerned the unanswerable question of one another. That they were living relics of time and history and might-have-been with all the best and worst things they had ever done locked up inside each other such that the strange, thrilling trappedness of being bound inextricably to Remus in this—in all things, in all their fractured bullshit lives where some unconquerable part of them seemed always to reside in each other no matter how much they tried to pretend otherwise—warred in him until it made him feel physically sick. But in that regard Sirius thought perhaps nothing had really changed.

By the time Remus came back to the tent Sirius had dug out the Walkman and was rewinding “Winter Lady” for the seventh time, lying back on the blanket thinking about the holy wounded, feeling possessed and sorry for himself, looking out the unzipped window at the wide meadow sky over Remus’s head where the stars were just beginning to wind across the gathering velvet of the night in ghostly sinews. In the wandlight Remus looked tired, his mouth drawn, nightness under his eyes; when he laid down next to Sirius his hair spread out in a coppery crown of thorns the blanket such that he could’ve passed for any number of exquisitely suffering bemartyred saints, which likely was what he wanted: Saint Sebastian in flannel and secondhand boots, waiting for someone to erotically tend his wounds.

“Do we have any tea left,” asked Remus. Sirius had set the lantern between them and already their shadows on the green canvas made a strange two-headed creature of their long limbs as if they’d been stretched together on a rack or like taffy, darkness grown into darkness. For the nth time since Sirius walked through mouth of the doorway and felt himself swallowed whole Remus looked away from him.

Sirius handed him a blue enamel mug of tea he’d made with more cream than Remus apparently liked as he made a face and set it between his knees; he himself could not remember how he liked his own tea and was thus still experimenting. “Anything interesting out there?” he asked.

“Nothing. Though I suppose a werewolf and a dog who sometimes turns into an escaped convict or Severus Snape depending on the mood might suffice.”

“Fuck you,” said Sirius, though he was smiling a little in spite of himself, quick and feral in the corner of his mouth. Through the headphones Cohen was singing again—I’m just a station on your way—and although he’d felt the song before as a kind of eulogy he wasn’t sure he had ever heard it as fully as it could be, the years sifting suddenly to the surface like oil on water, splintering in the scythe-eye of the quarter moon.

“The flannel and that acutely haunted thing you’ve got going on really does suit you, Severus. Gives you sort of a sexy Byronic look.”

“I didn’t realize you got off on that greasy just-crawled-out-from-under-a-rock vibe. Or that you were on a first-name basis.”

“I like to think I have diverse taste,” said Remus. He took another drink and frowned almost audibly. “Honestly Sirius—how much cream did you put in this?”

“Too much,” he said, “sorry about that—I don’t remember how you took it, or even how I used to make it really. I suppose your dearest Severus would get it all like, alchemically correct and better than any orgasm you’ve ever had and et cetera.”

At one point it would’ve started a monumental fight they could look back on with the wild unbelieving laughter of a good memory; now when Remus smiled it was with just enough teeth in it to be cruel. “Better than half, at least. It’s a shame the Polyjuice doesn’t impart that kind of knowledge when you think about it, it just seems unfair that you can’t even have a modicum of their brain to go with. Someone really ought to get on that.” He wiped his red mouth and untied his bootlaces, knees cracking when he bent them up, and from the corner of his eye Sirius could see him looking sideways in a way he probably thought was surreptitious but was in reality brittle and tentative, and all the more obvious for it. “What’re you listening to?”

“Your old miserable Cohen,” said Sirius, which was easier than the truth: I have been flaying myself open in shame and pathetic desperation for the last half hour and finding nothing but rust and the black-hole unraveling where my heart and my guts and my ribs used to be.

“When I was in America I listened to a lot of Cohen,” said Remus, staring at the wall, “and also a lot of Sonic Youth and sometimes Spacemen 3. For a few months I had a roommate who had all of those weird Godfrey Reggio documentaries on tape and sometimes I’d get stoned in the bathtub afterwards and listen to ‘The Stranger Song.’”

Every time he did this Sirius felt breathless, as if he’d just run a hundred miles to catch up to himself with a shattering wash of adrenaline and still he was nowhere in sight; after a while it had begun to feel like a language he was never going to learn, frozen undead for years and years and spat out newborn on the seashore unable to speak or eat or see through the blood-burn of sunset sharpening everything into a nauseous blinding smudge. From the shore near Lindisfarne he had learned to walk again and do magic again and reconciled shapes into names into meaning, words coming like a dam-burst, pain ebbing, fear smoldering; his was voice like a claw dragging over a gravestone and there was blood in the ragged Birkenstocks he’d stolen from someone’s bin while he repeated every step of the way the infernal mantra like a funeral dirge as the shore fanned out into the wild mossy wood where he slept fitfully with his hunger and his singular obsession sharp as a bone shard between his dog’s teeth: Get to Hogwarts. Find the rat. Stand up. Stand up. Stand up. Stand up.

Early on—in Lincolnshire maybe, or the lowlands near the Mease—he had been eating sour oranges he’d stolen from a morning market stall, trying to acclimate himself to food meant for living human beings again as he slipped on waves of nausea trying to keep from puking, the smell of it everywhere, sun-ripe sweetbitter rind under his dirty fingernails and between his teeth and the ground at his feet which swayed when he stood up, wondering with a sudden needle-shot like the lightning strike of waking up from a bad dream if this was what Remus had felt every single month since that night in 1965 when Fenrir Greyback put his hand down the back of his five-year-old neck on the backyard swing in the blood-spill of the sunset dusklight, saying, Come with me, and don’t make any noise. The night that made him; the night that had made all of them. He was not sure he had ever understood it more irrevocably. It felt too pretty to call it fate and yet at times there seemed to be little other explanation for the tangles that caught them all up like steel traps and led them in divine cyclical ritual back to each other in life and in death—to shorelines and thresholds and Remus’s sleepless knock on his door in Camden in ’79, to Godric’s Hollow and the Shrieking Shack and Somerset and their shadows made into the same miraculous clockwork creature stretched across the canvas walls of the tent like two pieces of the same broken thing. More and more he wasn’t sure they had ever had a choice. Perhaps more disturbingly he wasn’t sure he wanted one.

How did you live, he wanted to ask, how did you wake up every morning knowing. Are we really even here right now. But of course if he brought it up—he would never bring it up—he suspected Remus would deflect or contrive not to understand, or else look at him very sadly and soulfully, like Sirius was two spaghetti noodles short of mental. Since he’d already fucked up the tea and thus was already on thin ice in the sad fuck department he decided to save Remus the trouble and deflect instead: “What did you do in America,” he asked.

“At first I lived in the Midwest while I was researching lycanthropic theory. Then I was in the Plains for a few months. There are more packs out there—more structured ones, anyway. Looking back I suspect the old man knew all along this would happen again and thought I needed to brush up on my survival skills before the inevitable life-or-death struggle thing every other full moon. But most of them were willing to talk. Some of them even wanted to. It was a nice change from spying or trying to convince them to be cannon fodder because we asked nicely.”

“Sounds like you should’ve stayed,” said Sirius, “I mean, if it meant missing out on Round Two. I might’ve.” Which was a lie; he was sitting in a tent with Remus tracing the old vein-lines of the war to the monstrous heartbeat of its genesis. They were never going to be anywhere else.

“It’s a weird place,” Remus told him. He sat up and unzipped the tent all the way to dump out his tea, pale earthy brown with cream and nearly untouched. “Kind of a transitory thing. Like you get the feeling that you’re not meant to stay there for very long because it’s this, I don’t know, sort of this in-between place. A half-place. I’m just a station on your way, you know.”

Sirius turned off the Walkman; Remus, after all, was better than any singer or poet or self-made martyr when it came to possession by nightmare longing, which was a quality he’d found indescribably sexy once upon a time. By now he supposed he would be, too, in theory. “Still it sounds better than—”

“I stared at the ceiling and drove around back roads late at night and forgot to eat and sometimes I just sat in the middle of a fucking field and watched all the nothing until it got dark and I felt Obliviated. Is what I’m telling you.” On the wall their shadow split and fractured when Remus sat up and started digging through his bag for something until he came up with a cassette. “Come here,” he said.

Unfair, Sirius was thinking, unfair, you are fucking unfair, and yet when Remus stretched the headphones over both their ears he let his head rest against Remus’s temple in a perverse gesture of holy absolution greater than any word spoken between them in the last year, feeling in their oldnew skin and their out-of-tune breath and their heartbeats thrumming runic up against each other you-and-me and youandme a pure and fragile ceremony like a spell such that he thought he could almost see the slim silver threads of it unfurling around the places where their fingers brushed electrically in the night-light like a memory. It was the Modern Lovers’ LP from ’76. This was, he recalled, one of the first records he had bought after fleeing Grimmauld Place the summer before sixth year, when he would listen to it in the spare bedroom at the Potters’ house smoking out the window or drinking with James, writing letters, loving it like magic or food or blood or wine; it was what he’d been playing when Remus had come to his door one brittle-boned January night with his backpack and a trunk to ensconce himself semi-permanently on Sirius’s couch after the pipes burst at his shitty closet of a bedsit, starting it over again while they made an enormous late-night fry-up and fallen asleep together stoned on the couch while the record clicked over at the end of the side on the turntable like a lullaby.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d listened to it though he reckoned it was sometime before ’81 as by then he could hardly stand to hear it: the album had long been one of those ineffable things he associated utterly with Remus the way certain pieces of your life were forever sculpted by other people such that when you really looked you could see the sutures you’d woven together, the marvelous machinery that would not exist without having known them. Often he caught himself making a joke with a particular black tinge or stealing lavender from someone’s garden or reaching for Earl Grey automatically and realized none of it might have been if he hadn’t loved them, if they hadn’t nurtured these things in each other. During his absence Remus had started smoking menthols at some point in the unmoored roaming years like Sirius used to, and himself he wondered if he’d have loved the album so much if it hadn’t been for his friends and his strange new homelessness and Remus on his couch, drawn there on irresistible golden strings like a key in a lock. Thus by ’81, when Remus had begun disappearing from the flat sometimes for weeks at a time and Sirius’s mouth was forever full of the shrill glass shards of curses and they hardly saw the point of wearing anything but mourning black anymore he had filed the album in the back of his record crate with all the other emotional aneurysms stacked one misery after another like a selection of names in a guestbook at a funeral. By his own quick reckoning it had been close to fifteen years now since he’d heard “Roadrunner.”  
Nostalgia was its own heady opiate but this was more than that—a thick spreading yearning for a nameless something which birthed all the other aches, desire without solace or solution. Just barely Remus pressed closer to him, hip to hip, the ghost of Sirius’s stubble rasping against his cheek when he adjusted the headphones again. “Have you ever been to Massachusetts,” Sirius asked him.

“Twice.” Remus’s mouth twisted at the side when Sirius turned to him; there was maybe an inch of space between them and a new, narrow scar underneath Remus’s jawline. “In some ways it made me think of you. Very old and very beautiful and very haunted. I always got the feeling something was watching me.” Sirius saw that he was looking at his strange and spidery inky hands in his lap and fought the urge to shove them in his pockets. “But mostly the desert made me think of you while I was there.”

“How’s that.”

For a moment as the song faded out there was a tinny ear-ringing silence while Remus didn’t answer and instead fished his cigarettes out of the pocket of his jeans and put one between his lips, not bothering to look for his lighter at first until he seemed to catch himself and realize what he was waiting for, and Sirius realized it too with a ghostly shiver that spread through both of them like they had read each other’s minds. Summoning heat in his thoughts—accompanied as it always was with a needling and galvanizing urge to impress—he reached out and cupped his palm around Remus’s mouth, murmuring a white-hot orange flame into the tip, which caught in Remus’s eyes with a spinal strike of déjà vu so pure he wondered with an out-of-body thrill if they’d somehow been throttled back into the past as he watched Remus take a drag and then hand it over again, holding Sirius’s eyes and letting his fingers brush his palm, which was still very warm. Magic still surprised him sometimes, not so much the fact of it but that it was still there, inescapable as gravity or a heartbeat, another ineluctable symptom of life that occasionally felt unreal, like the sound of his own laughter or his own pulsing moving shifting body casting its long evening shadow jarringly behind him like a thing made of brittle yearning and little else. Remus tugged at his wrist—thumb tracing the blue skip of his veins—until Sirius pressed the cigarette back to his lips for him, where Remus held it in place for a beat—then two, then three—and then let go.

“The desert was so—it’s also very haunted and very beautiful but it feels like being swallowed. Or like you already were before you ever walked into it,” said Remus. “At night sometimes I swore I could see ghosts, or that there was a dementor following me just waiting for me to collapse of thirst or something. The stars were different there. Like they’d never changed.”

Sirius felt himself frown. “I’m not sure how it could’ve been like a dementor, exactly. That’s kind of a unique flavor of like, soul-shredding horror, Moony.”

At his shoulder Remus shrugged, moving Sirius’s own so it felt like he’d done it himself. “You wouldn’t know,” he said, “what it was like.” As if he alone had suffered inexorably for twelve years among the desert bluffs and the winding cities and the wild unpeopled ends of the green earth with nothing but the brimless bowl of the sky and all his life left to be tragically lived. “I will tell you—even after I knew. That night in the Shack. It still took me a while to reconcile it all. And in the end I’m not sure my own judgment of you is much different now that I know the whole of it. We’re still—we’re the same people.”

Are we really, he wondered. Likely this was as chillingly close as Remus would ever get to admitting to anyone other than himself and his dead festering open wounds on the worst nights that he believed Sirius deserved his twelve years if for no greater crime than breaking his heart. Some things could not be made right again; hence the punishment fit; the end. Never mind that Remus had broken his too, or that by his own admission he had not made even a cursory attempt to petition for custody of Harry, that he had no interest in seeing the transcript of the sentencing and instead fled to Ghent before Christmas of ‘81 to drop acid and fuck various and sundry and pretend to suffer bravely in storybook locales; never mind that the instant the pulsebeat whisper of the idea insinuated itself inside him like pocket lint he’d been as convinced as Sirius had once been that the monster was sleeping in the next room and making him breakfast and getting stoned with him on the couch late at night when they were too afraid to sleep for their deathly dreams, his ears ringing louder and louder beside Remus with a thunderstorm static he could not shake. That Remus had been wrong about the details scarcely mattered. Still Sirius had not outrun the ghost of his blood or the grotesque suggestion that lived like an itch at the backs of their minds (he didn’t remember who had first mentioned Remus’s name when the shadows began to lap at their heels, only that it hadn’t been Peter); it was in this that he was truly guilty, in this and a thousand other crimes real and imagined, too slight or too insidious or too trivial to prosecute: Snape and the Willow at sixteen, and his anger at Remus’s anger afterwards—how could you even think, he remembered asking, except of course Remus had thought, because Sirius _had_ , and he hadn’t cared enough to even understand. Remus watching him with a naked tearing hurt he had stopped trying to hide, fucking someone loudly and without a silencing charm while Remus lay awake on the couch, going round to James and Lily’s alone towards the end, the callous, callow tendency to reel in and then push away, in confusion or cowardice. His insecurity, his jealousy, his rotted-out suspicion spreading like a disease. On the rare occasions when he looked himself in the eye in the mirror he thought he saw something in his face that could not change again.

No apology could ever encompass the gallows-noose of the shadows that reached back across time all the way to their compartment on the Hogwarts Express on September the First, 1971; it wouldn’t even fit in his mouth, and as such he wasn’t sure why he kept trying. “I’m sorry,” he said for the ten thousandth time, “and I’ve been sorry for fourteen years, and I’m not sure what else to do about that,” softly, like it’d make a fucking difference; in ‘81 he’d caught Remus looking at the insides of his arms when he took off his jacket and found that he sometimes seemed to pull the plug out of conversations when he walked into a room. When he didn’t get an answer Sirius took another drag of the cigarette they were sharing and said, louder, “Is that what you wanted to hear or do I need to compose the world’s saddest elegiac poem for you before you’ll even fucking consider it might be true? Since I think deep down what you really want is for me to die on my knees apologizing.”

“I don’t want you—I don’t want to hear you to apologize to me anymore. I can’t stand it when you look at me that way.”

“Well why do you keep—”

“I don’t want to do this again, Sirius, I’ll need to drink half the night if we do but we don’t even have anything and we still have to share this fucking tent tonight. Forget it.” His knuckles were white where he’d wrapped a hand around his forearm and Sirius could tell he was looking at his mangled hands again, which made him wonder not for the first time if they made Remus uncomfortable. The only person who had asked him about the tattoos point-blank was Emmeline Vance, who made an omelette with him in her kitchen and asked about the tealeaf dregs marked on his wrists where they bladed out violently from the sleeves of her ex-boyfriend’s old sweater. 

“You know I’ve never really understood you,” said Sirius. From the cigarette he took a long obnoxious drag and met Remus’s eyes for rather longer than either of them had yet dared but for that one exhilarating immortal night last year when nothing else had mattered but their shattering hearts at the end of twelve years. “There was a time when I thought I could, I mean, when we could’ve known like every facet of each other because we weren’t so different underneath everything. And really we’re not but that never did us any good. Looking at us now I’m not sure you could tell who’s more fucked up anymore. And I still don’t understand you any better.”

“That’s really not true. If it’d been me I wouldn’t have come out looking half like you.”

“Why.”

“Because you’re the only person I know who could spend a dozen years in Azkaban with your body and soul getting siphoned in this kind of unholy entropic corrosion and still come out of it looking,” Remus reached over to straighten Sirius’s side of the headphones, “that good. And I know you probably know it already so stop fishing for more.”

“Flattery isn’t going to get you anywhere. Besides you only care about being liked when it’s someone who doesn’t know you yet.” Part of him understood how cruel it was but when he lowered the cigarette to Remus’s lips again Remus was watching him as he hollowed his cheeks around Sirius’s fingers, shadow-play flickering across his odd ageless face.

“Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it, you asshole.” In his memory he couldn’t recall Remus having ever commented on his appearance one way or another; something flared in his gut like a hunger pang before it blew out again and Remus took the last languid drag of their cigarette, digging his bitten-bloody fingernails into Sirius’s palm-lines and his forearm where he’d drawn one of his first and worst tattoos, a faded black vesica in a crude approximation of the Chalice Well. When Remus finally released his hand so he could put it out Sirius’s fingers were slightly wet from his mouth. “But Severus really does add something sexy to your wounded Heathcliff aura, especially since you put maybe ten percent more effort into your hair.”

For a moment he thought Remus meant he was sexy but then he remembered they were talking about Snape and felt more put out than he could remember feeling for a long time; rhythmically he traced the pretty crepuscular indentations Remus had left on his arm and wondered if any of them would turn to teeth-mark bruises by morning. “Didn’t you have a thing for redheads? Which is weird given that you _are_ mostly a redhead.”

“Mostly?”

“What color even is your hair? Sometimes it’s very red and then sometimes it’s more of a light reddish brown. There’s not really a word for that. Wheaty, maybe?”

“Wheaty.” He was trying to sound cool and dearly unimpressed but it was undercut by the reflective mirror-shard brightness of his eyes, which were watching Sirius’s mouth. “And I don’t have a type really. I do like dark hair. Severus’s would look better if he’d comb it.”

“You were always going on about Gideon Prewett’s red hair.”

“He had lovely hair. So did his brother.” At some halcyon juncture in ‘79 Remus had taken a weeklong trip to Brighton with Gideon (who he was sleeping with) and Fabian (who he was not) and came back to London with the memory of sunburn freckling the back of his neck and a new physical closeness with Fabian particularly that made Sirius wonder with a rabid, implacable fascination what, exactly, the trip had entailed. “I wasn’t aware that you liked my hair enough to postulate about the color.”

“We’re not casual friends, Moony, you know we’re both creepy as all fuck.”

“That’s one of my favorite flavors of us,” said Remus. His laughter, like some priceless relic unearthed, threading into Sirius’s. “Who else is going to let me talk about Severus Snape’s appalling unrealized sexy potential and not only look me in the eye but still like me afterwards.”

“Fucking—stop talking,” said Sirius, but he was still laughing. “Isn’t Snape like, the entire reason you couldn’t have kept your job even if you wanted to? After the outing you to the school thing and the whole haha here’s how to kill a werewolf, just in case any of you kids need to know that kind of thing. I mean he _hates_ you, he hates me even worse but every time your name comes up around him it’s like this seething caldera ready to explode any minute. And definitely not in an attractive way.” Privately he was murderously jealous for reasons both obvious and inexplicable, like a pain somewhere down too deep to ever locate the source, and he wondered for at least the hundredth time if Remus had at one point harbored a perverse masochistic crush, or possibly had some kind of blistering hatefuck thing going on after hours in the potions dungeon while he was teaching at Hogwarts.

“Don’t worry, I hate him enough for a dozen people. Probably enough to live on as its own feral wraith-thing after I’m dead, it’s, for a while it was like having constant heartburn whenever he was in the room. I don’t think he’s ever felt anything in his life that isn’t spite or jealousy. But it’s just, look at him, Padfoot, he’s got that weird—like the universe would’ve had to compensate for everything else, so. You know what I mean?”

Remus was looking at him with a tiny comma of a smile hiding in the corner of his mouth and an eyebrow quirked as if they were sharing the wavelength of the same thought. And they were: Sirius knew what he meant, but instead he said, “No. He can make potions? Because that doesn’t seem like much of a trade-off when he’s the human equivalent of stepping in dog shit.”

“I mean he’s probably got a huge dick,” said Remus.

“Jesus Christ. It’s probably like three inches hard.”

“Don’t act like you haven’t thought about it. I know you and I know you’ve at least thought about looking.”

“Fine, but the point is he’d be a lousy fuck regardless, he’d probably never shut up about your inferior blowjobs and he’d be all clinical about it like he was mixing a potion. And it’s _Snape_ , Moony, do you really want that in, in any part of you,” he said, with extreme prejudice. At the juncture of his shoulder and his neck Remus was laughing his loud cackling laugh, convulsing slightly with it the way he used to in school or in the flat, in hallways and cupboards and the kitchen and late at night in the cold months of 1980 when they shared Sirius’s bed, his nose pressed tightly to the pulse in Sirius’s neck, feeling the laughter there like he hadn’t done in fifteen years, or maybe more; he felt so young. They were still, he realized, so young. “I’m not looking for you either, so don’t even ask.”

“But you _have_ thought about it. I mean obviously you’ve thought about it.”

The truth was he was just petty enough to wonder and yet just as worried about the potential blow to his already-decimated pride to let curiosity win out, so he’d settled for a few quick gropes through his jeans and had come away more concerned that his own cock didn’t even work anymore, which was disappointing but not altogether surprising after twelve years dissolving from the inside out; that his ability and desire for sex had been punctured too hardly even seemed worth caring about when the rest of him had been run through a metaphorical meat grinder and then picked apart by carrion creatures, but then he started worrying fearfully about his lack of interest as a symptom of something deeper, malignant and irreparable. He’d consoled himself by expertly and dismally theorizing that the thought of jerking off as Snape had put him off sex so severely he’d never get hard again, and even if he did he’d probably remember shuffling around in Snape’s skin like an overgrown bat and wilt before proceedings could advance beyond an aborted two-minute handjob. “Alright,” he said. “But even if I have I’m still not showing you. Having is never as good as wanting, you know, so maybe think about that the next time you’re so desperate you start thinking Severus fucking Snape might be a good lay in some alternate universe where somehow the world is even shittier.”

“It’s not like you have to _like_ him or anything.”

“So, what, you’d fuck him but you’d be really mad about it?”

“Haven’t you ever done that?”

“Yes, but never with someone who’d probably give me a ten-minute speech critiquing my technique as I’m going down on him or whatever. Remus—there’s a whole world out there and it’s not going to keep its socks on the whole time and deduct points when you don’t gracefully change positions or get the angle just right.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“I was trying to be motivational. And maybe get it through your head that you can do better, like, astronomically, infinitely better.”

“Thanks Sirius, but I already do know that. Good to know you believe in me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“It was more in your cheesy overwrought delivery.”

“Fuck you.”

“Take some Polyjuice and we’ll see,” said Remus, Vanishing the cigarette and the ash wandlessly from where it had fallen on the blanket. “Tomorrow we can go north and see about that abandoned estate, which means camping again probably. Or we can head to Oxford and see if your cousin’s found anything for us to check up on. And maybe stay in a hotel.”

“No reason we can’t do both if we’re up early enough. It’s not like either of us sleeps.”

“We might sleep better in actual beds, you know, just a thought. And I’m the one who has to drive.”

“I was just thinking the Forest of Dean might be nice to camp in.”

“This isn’t a fucking road trip.”

“I know it isn’t a fucking road trip but if we’re going to be miserable we might as well do it somewhere that looks like it could be the backdrop of some high-flown romantic tragedy and/or doomed but sexy consumption by gnawing possession. You got, what, twelve years of that?”

There was a strange laugh high in the back of Remus’s throat that sawed jarringly along the song in Sirius’s ear, _I can’t stand what you do_ , pure spectral caustic nostalgia in the sound of it, in the sacred longing. “Complete with sexual haunting and betrayals like any tragedy worth its salt.”

“Remember I can be two men at once for your Brontë fantasies, or your Waugh fantasies, whichever you’re getting off on. The all-purpose brooding villain and the monstrous romantic obsession dwelling in your own mind et cetera rolled into a two-for-one.”

“You say that like you couldn’t play both all on your own without any help,” said Remus. Then he closed his eyes.

Through the tinny headphones and in his uncovered ear next to Remus’s he could hear the nightbirds and the naked murmur of the July wind in the trees, loamy-sweet, the earth turned to fruit, proud of its own abundance; in a yawn between songs his arm had gotten lodged under Remus’s shoulder blades so that his hand stuck out numbly on the other side where Remus was tracing a thumb along his knuckles he felt with a detached phantom-limb bloodlessness, as if he was made of scar tissue or tree bark. Together they drifted in and out of sparse ungentle sleep and woke at the same time from fragments of dreams that might’ve been the same but always escaped on waking like caught fish. When he opened his eyes he often found Remus watching him, or he was already watching Remus, some ruthless internal compass inside him pointing north and north and north, suspended there in the velvet cradle of the night between past and present, the knowing and the unknowing, between desire and impossibility. Overhead an owl-call woke him with the iron-tang taste of blood in his mouth, feeling Remus’s hair whispering against his neck and his pulse warm and tangled up with his own like a memory—the river on the Lupin property after sixth year, their bare feet and their hands, the bruised fruit of their skin—and thought, _Oh, oh, his blood or mine_.

Time had little meaning anymore. He opened his eyes and they were eleven again, fourteen, eighteen, twenty-one; in his mind he reached out and felt it stretch and warp around them the way it had sometimes done since he’d been back, spinning out from some centrifugal origin dense and devouring in the places where their hands touched like the spiritual consummation from which everything else was born. Indeed sometimes he could only think of himself in relation to this, the wanting and the hunger, the forfeit and the fulfillment—he was always hungry now, a wanting-machine sharpened on the teeth of forgetting, voracious for food and rage and pain and years and love and lust and words and memory in all the rotted-out pieces of himself that spread from the primordial root in his groin to his gut and his heart and his head, yet often he couldn’t eat more than the crust of a sad turkey sandwich; it was in that way that he supposed Remus too had starved as he wandered the exalted edges of the world gorging himself on memory, forever unsated. They were men made not of years but of appetite and absence, of a longing so unambiguous it resembled famine.

He woke with a murderous crick in his neck and the headphones dislodged, having left an imprint on his cheek; the tape was long finished and he could feel the artful tectonic shifting of Remus’s back where Sirius’s arm was still trapped underneath, the laddered notches of his spine like a nautilus unfurled and the swell of his ribs as he breathed softly against Sirius’s side. At some point he’d gotten a mouthful of Remus’s hair and he rubbed at his mouth with the back of his wrist when he sat up to turn off the Walkman, dislodging his arm from Remus’s back as gently as he could. “Moony,” he said, rough with sleep as he laid down again, “when did you start smoking menthols?”

“‘83,” said Remus. His voice was a thousand years old; wherever Sirius went Remus flowed, their hips pressed tight, his nose sliding into the basin of Sirius’s neck and shoulder, breathing where Sirius breathed, water into wine. “It was cheaper to just keep rolling my own but once I started I couldn’t stop. Too late now.”

“Don’t be an asshole, you can quit if you want to. Get some of those Muggle nicotine patches or start on Every Flavor Beans or something.” Blatantly he was avoiding the obvious and he knew Remus knew it. Woozy with unsleeping and the nearness of their fingers he pressed his head against Remus’s, mouth to the base of his skull, more of a crown than a kiss. “I was just surprised is all.”

“Were you really.”

“You always hated them before—you wouldn’t even bum one from me, you’d just bitch about it and say I killed all your plants with the shitty smoke.” Himself he’d started smoking them because Caradoc Dearborn had, who Sirius had sort of dated with a secret and breathless sloppiness for nearly a year until they broke up in the aftermath of a fight over something profoundly stupid—Dearborn kept sneaking off to Manchester without telling anyone and wouldn’t quit playing shitty Pink Floyd albums; given the amount of noise Remus used to make in the kitchen whenever Dearborn came over Sirius had suspected with an unpleasant gut-shot of something not quite guilt that Remus had a crush on him. Three months later Dearborn was dead. “So yes, it’s not the weirdest thing about you now. But it’s still surprising.”

“My clothes always smelled like you and the flat and you also used my cactus as an ashtray. It had the biggest collection of cigarette-ends in London.”

“So did you!”

“Yes but it liked mine,” said Remus, his mouth curving into a smile meltingly against Sirius’s neck. “I would smoke an entire pack when you were gone whole nights towards the end. Sometimes I remembered to get a new one before you came back and sometimes I was too drunk or just didn’t care enough to bother because I figured, why should I, he pretends it isn’t happening so why shouldn’t I.”

Sirius swallowed, feeling it burn incriminatingly against Remus’s unmoving lips. Inappropriately and somewhat vindictively he wondered if Remus did this with other men, if he did it in bed—if he liked to play with his food before he ate it. “I don’t remember,” he said.

“I’m sure you don’t.” Against his neck Remus’s eyelashes fluttered like mothwings at the red songbeat drumming of his pulse which overflowed like a river, an uncontainable admission spreading along his skin like blood spilled. “Since you’ve been back it’s just—I wonder, sometimes, if you offered up the best, or at least the things you were most eager to have gone because they were difficult. So now you don’t even have to think about them at all and it can just be like it never even happened.”

“Like _you_ did? What the fuck else were you trying to accomplish in Antarctica and the shittiest parts of America other than the obvious self-oblivion.”

They were treading near some drowned thing that had been trying to surface perhaps for decades, Sirius understood, yet every time they did this it vanished when they got too close, the perpetual Fata Morgana leaving them stranded and blind in the middle of their own shipwreck with nothing and no one but each other and what they could make between themselves. Against the inside of his arm Remus slid his fingers around the runic sigil-marks like an anthropologist or a conservator unearthing something old-new and precious, straining for the intrinsic eternal they had found in each other so long ago like magic or history or a language they couldn’t speak without each other; when Remus spoke he felt it—God—he felt it in his throat as his own, compulsion in it, and fear, and anger. If he opened his eyes he was sure they would share the same body. “Isn’t it fucked up,” said Remus, “that you were the one I missed most of all. Even more than James and Lily and the baby, or Peter, or any of the rest of them. It was always you. On the days when I could’ve killed you myself I still—it was still because of me, more than them, more than anything else. I hated it and I wanted, I mean, I’d have scaled the fucking walls of Azkaban just to get to you and I’m still not sure what I wanted more. That night last year, I still didn’t know if I wanted to hold you or strangle you when I saw your name on the map. In the end I just let the adrenaline take over.”

“It would be,” said Sirius, as if in thrall, “the same as doing it to yourself. Or me doing it to myself I guess. Because you are—you are a part of me, for better or for worse, you know. Not in the fucking crybaby Morrissey kind of way either, I mean it’s like, you exist inside of me. There’s this piece of you inside me like a living thing, I swear sometimes it’s always been there but it’s just—it’s obviously unkillable, or they’d have taken it.”

Or perhaps losing it was equivalent to death. Perhaps only death could cure them of each other as only death could cure them of themselves if they truly were an unconquerable part of each other’s souls, as necessary as magic; by the time he thought to ask—he wouldn’t have asked—the silence had long gone stale and Remus was asleep again, or pretending to be, his head turned away in ritctus dreams.

He thought he remembered something like this from before—had they all gone camping, or had he watched Remus sleep before he took off from the tent noisily to piss?—but when he followed the muffled, lyrical scent of it he found nothing but the door of whatever memory it was slamming shut on its hinges. Initially he hadn’t even remembered what his own body had looked like, and after the shock of coming to land again he’d been stunned at his chalky-white skin cut with tangles of tattoos like blood-blackened sigils, the sharp ridges of his bones. Any sense of humanness or being-ness they swallowed gluttonously whole such that he existed less as a man and more a formless, viscous figment capable of little but an eternal spiritual bludgeoning; after that they picked delicately at the abstract and beloved in an endless slideshow of charcuterie to be considered with such famished and zealous lust he was almost grateful when it was finally gone. The Potters’ garden at high summer from the window of the guest room he’d stayed in from sixth year on. The sound of his brother’s voice. Certain laws of arithmancy and the properties of aconite. Remus’s loopy voice the morning after the full moon in the Shack, fucked from howling, the mattress bursting in an ecstasy of feathers. His favorite lines of Yeats and Sexton and Brautigan. The waterfall cascade of the invisibility cloak after midnight. James’s bad singing whenever someone put on _Led Zeppelin IV_ , the way he’d comb his fingers through his impossible hair whenever there was a girl around. Lily’s feet on the coffee table and her fingernails painted black. August 1978. Dearborn trying to use a telephone. Lying on the couch with the baby, asleep on his shoulder. McKinnon and Meadowes dancing together at a club. Making carbonara or chicken pot pie with Remus while a record played, all the windows open, autumn-orange, season of omens and dust. Conversations—mouths without words. The time signature of London at night. The moon—the last moon, October-red, lancing through the gap in his curtains.

Things came back and they didn’t. Inside himself he could feel the shapes of things missing, the filament-roots of his memory torn via ceremonial trepanning and sucked out through a straw; even when he eventually recalled something—almost always at spontaneous intervals now, and in an overcharged head-rush that wasn’t entirely pleasant—the texture and the taste of it often felt different, like he could feel the rough soul-seams around the edges; it was no longer something intrinsically and irrevocably his own but something that had been taken from him and later reclaimed, like sea glass washing up on the shore. The only thing he had never grieved for was himself.

Half an hour or so later he pulled the blanket up around Remus’s shoulders and clambered out of the tent as quickly and quietly as he could before Remus had a chance to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing and/or fix him with his favorite accusatory stare, the one that had changed only in intensity over the years and said all too plainly that Sirius alone was responsible for all the world’s aches and pains and ills but especially Remus’s. Unkindly he wondered if Remus ever got cold on that fucking cross he’d built himself but the hot-coal flare of it smoothed out into cinders as he walked along the narrow creek a few paces from their tent, skimming his hand across the surface of the water where it spread out like a thread of needlepoint across the patchwork plains, catching the light of the moon like a blessing until it wound out of sight; Remus had always liked to let himself get cold, which possibly qualified as a very specific kind of sexual fetish. He liked to shiver. Sirius himself could never stand it and as such he would do almost anything to insulate himself against the bite of hoarfrost gnawing always at his heels: writing enormously long letters to James and Remus and Peter during the summer holidays, running Mrs. Potter’s weekend errands, cooking Remus huge meals for no real reason except the strange hypnotic thrill of coming home to find him still there, blowing a truly unwise amount of his inheritance trying to grow pot in his bathroom closet, holding the baby, keeping a bottle of bad whiskey on his nightstand, sleeping with various and sundry, spending nights on James’s couch. Still he was often freezing.

Under the rich burnished blue-dark of the sky the land slept in a kind of deathly pastoral, the tent just visible from where he was standing near the open mouth of a copse of trees, beckoning with a compulsion not unlike a curse, and he knew with as much conviction as he’d ever known anything Remus was lying awake looking out at the same shimmering wheel of stars Sirius was, wishing the same impossible, seductive things, wanting to be anywhere and nowhere but here and here and here. Long ago he’d theorized what it was about him that made people like this, an inescapable contagion in his blood or a fog that ensnared the things he loved most, but if it was in him then it was in Remus too—a twin possession that at some point had changed hands to the other, the last ones left standing, both of them traitor and betrayed, consigned to each other’s souls unto death. Yet they could never find it in themselves to ask the question repeating always like a record skipping again and again and again on the refrain of a familiar song, the inviolable heartbeat-mantra, which was, of course, What have I done to you?

—

After Hogwarts, for the first year or so after he’d moved into the Camden flat and sometimes had trouble sleeping in the swallowing emptiness of it and thus was forced to do some abysmal three a.m. self-psychoanalysis, he had a recurring dream that yanked him back into Grimmauld Place as if he’d been Summoned umbilically down the bathtub drain and spat out of a vicious womb into the bathroom across the hall from his old bedroom, where he crawled out of the claw-footed bathtub and stitched himself to the shadows like a thief, looking for any exit but finding every window and every door sealed as he walked the narrow greenblack halls with a swelling panic in his gut, feeling hunted like prey; the house was deserted, airless, as if it had been waiting with an open mouth to reclaim what was rightfully its own—as if he had left a fatal piece of himself behind like bait when he made his escape. Eventually he came to the cellar door and went down slowly into the heart of darkness, having idiotically gleaned nothing from the laws of Muggle horror movies, pausing midway with his heart between his teeth when he heard something begin to moan like a trapped animal. When he reached the bottom of the stairs he realized it was himself. Then something slammed the door shut behind him.

Typically he woke in a cold drenching sweat and rolled a joint with shaky hands while he sat on the couch with a cup of lavender tea and something mindless on the television just for the empty nothing-noise of it, wishing Remus was there—both James and Peter became disproportionately angry at being roused for anything in the night for as long as they shared a dormitory—and thus drawing certain pathetic conclusions about himself and his potential as a functioning adult who could at least make a pretense of having his shit together for more than two days at a time. Until dawn he would lie awake stoned, composing letters to his brother he burned and listening to the drunks argue outside the front window, worrying abstractly that he’d go insane before the war was over and that no one would ever love him; remembering the tenor of that blistering insomniac dread when he’d looked at his reflection for the first time in the broken windowpane of an abandoned house in Durham he had to wonder if time and experience had proved him correct in fact and in fear, which made him feel unfortunately justified in all the sadsack crybaby bullshit of yesteryear: he’d underestimated his potential for tragedy both self-inflicted and otherwise so abysmally it was hilarious. Distantly he hoped Harry had found his way to all the good Wire albums, or maybe just that Harry could actually manage to talk about his feelings in ways Sirius still struggled to elucidate in his mid-thirties.

The day of the full moon they were on the M4 near Reading, planning to scout out an old farmhouse and the surrounding fields that had once belonged to the Bones family and then spend the night in the caved-in barn, roaming the Berkshire Downs together until daybreak cracked like a yolk over the horizon, at which point they’d check into a hotel so Remus could sleep in a real bed for a night or two while Sirius lay precariously on the very far cliff’s-edge of the other side, staring out the window. Initially he thought he must have dozed off for a few minutes while Remus was inside the gas station getting burnt coffees and cheap Muggle chocolate bars but when he came to his eyes were already wide open and Remus was starting the car again, the last ten minutes a total blackout void, and Sirius felt his heart slam against the cage of his ribs with the ignition like it was trying to catch up; still throbbing with the nightmare shock surging through him from top to tail he took a drink of coffee, immediately scalding his tongue and the back of his throat and wondering as they pulled back onto the highway whether his divination powers had come into late bloom.

By his rough estimation it had been almost exactly nineteen years since he’d walked the halls of Grimmauld Place and yet he remembered every portrait and every creaky floorboard with a fluency suggestive of inborn muscle memory, which he supposed made a ruthless kind of sense: the house and the name left a stain, an oily, venomous thing spreading inexorably from the base of the skull, infiltrating every thought, every pain. When he’d calmed down enough to be sure he wasn’t going to start hallucinating again he rolled down the window further to breathe in the mossy-sweet July humidity, smelling the coming rain, the bright shattering cloudburst of the midday sun cutting through the thick hush of midday greylight; they’d turned the radio to a news station because everything else was intolerable in a way that made Sirius not so sorry to have missed some of the worst aspects of the ‘80s, i.e. the hair and the synths and the dick-measuring, but something had a hold on him—the same thing that had always had a hold on him, cloying like a burr at his temple, an inevitable pendulum tick-tick-tick like a time bomb so quiet he could almost mistake it for his own heart. Chain reactions, unified theory, locked doors. And there was no such thing as coincidence, was there, in this foregone fate of his.

The genius of it—the perfect conceit, sending them on a bullshit grail quest with the answer already gestating like a sleeping sickness waiting to strike. Let them chase a figment across the plains and the lilting hills and the midnight seashores, let them run a few errands along the way deluded on the value of their discoveries and thus their own unique worth, let them think they’d arrived at the only conclusion wholly of their own volition as if they had not been set deliberately on a one-way path with no other exit from the very start; if Dumbledore hadn’t already taken it upon himself to survey the contents of the Blacks’ Gringotts vault he’d be astonished. Seethingly he wondered if they were running behind schedule and if so how long it would be before they received a shrewd hint via owl or relayed through another Order contact on their doomed route to the infernal inevitable.

While he was leaning as far as he safely could out the window through the gauzy veil of disillusionment magic to gulp down the sulky summer air he realized Remus must have said something to him that he hadn’t heard, because now he was staring fixedly at the road with his lips pursed very tight as if to hold something brutal back behind his teeth. On the radio the newscaster was reading a story about a body that had washed up on the shore near Dover with all its teeth gone and its fingerprints burnt off, which provided the deathly cosmic impetus and the soundtrack alike to set all their lands in order, as it went; every single thing he could think of to say already felt like a eulogy.

“Moony,” he asked, having found of late that Remus was sometimes more amenable to suggestion with the nickname, “when are we going up to London?”

Remus didn’t turn to look at him but Sirius could practically hear him frown. “We’re not. It’d be too dangerous right now—if it’s not Death Eaters at our throats it’d be the Ministry, and there’s just no reason for us to go when there are plenty of other people who can do it without risking their literal souls.” But even as he said it Sirius could see his fingers tightening incrementally around the steering wheel, white-knuckled, teeth clenched. “There’s an awful lot of dog catchers in London. Why do you ask?”

So very long ago he had been delusional and fucking stupid enough to believe they shared a strange spiritual circuitry that allowed them to read each other’s minds, as if being around each other for so long had bred a conjoined consciousness in them—in all four of them, but especially himself and Remus, and more so after Remus became his quasi-roommate; it was like they had grown together into a tangled knot of becoming, capable of an innate Legilimency or simply bound up in each other the way they were bound up in magic deep down, strung through every hairline fracture of each other’s souls like ivy carving through brick and concrete. Now he found he sometimes couldn’t anticipate how Remus would react to certain things and got nervous before he brought said things up, which had led to Illuminating Realization #10957 while staring at the ceiling late one night steeped in self-disgust on the couch in Remus’s house in Somerset: namely that they had been royally fucking wrong about each other all along and perhaps the whole thing—divine spiritual connection, the unending primal obsession at the heart of all the other obsessions, et cetera—had existed entirely in his splintered dumbfuck head, crafted out of loneliness and dearly wishful thinking. Or perhaps it was very real and he’d had so much time to meditate on it and on both of them in the interim that he could convince himself of anything. As their current circumstance so clearly articulated it wouldn’t be the first time.

Around the wheel he could see blood under Remus’s thumb, his knuckles still raw and slightly unhealed red from the last full moon; it seemed wrong, to ask him now. But if not now, the voice was buzzing vengefully at the back of his teeth, then when? “I was just thinking, you know—or I guess I should say I had a wild dream a while ago or—”

“I asked what you wanted to go to London for, not a rundown of your questionable sixth-year dream interpretations.”

He knew already and it was obvious; there seemed somehow not enough time, or too much. For a moment he wondered if they were really here or if this was a dream too, and he’d wake up in Azkaban again soon enough or perhaps an alternate dimension. He hadn’t paid enough attention in divination to know whether it was possible to project oneself into another reality via astral plane or similar but he made a mental note to find out soon. “We need to go see my old house,” said Sirius, “my parents’ old house. In Islington.”

“And why would you even want to go near—”

“Don’t play dumb, Remus, you know exactly why, fucking _Dumbledore_ knows why, it’s the whole reason he’s got us doing this in the first place rather than, I don’t know, Vance or Kingsley or anyone else, we’re supposed to solve the riddle and pretend there was ever a choice involved at all while the old man strokes his beard and pretends this is shocking new information. We need to just get it over with because sooner or later it’s going to be forced on us anyway and I’d like to get the row of house-elf heads down before we have to let actual human beings in there.”

Viciously Remus grabbed Sirius’s half-empty coffee—he’d already finished his own—and took a very long drink. His hands were shaking, from the caffeine or from the moon-fingers pulling always at his skin and waxing like shadows in his veins or maybe both. “I’m not driving you to London to get yourself killed or worse,” said Remus. “Have you even got a key? How the hell do you think you’re going to get in?”

“It’s a magical house, Remus, it’ll recognize me.”

“It’ll recognize—is it any wonder Muggles make fun of magic. And I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been there like James and Peter got to go there.”

“Because my parents didn’t like your fucking last name and the house would’ve eaten you alive if they didn’t,” Sirius snapped, “I mean, did you ever once think there might’ve been a reason I didn’t want you there. You weren’t missing anything anyway but uncomfortable dinners and James getting into my dad’s absinthe and puking into the fireplace.” 

Unsaid: My mother would have put your head on a pike right next to mine and let the London rats chew out your eyes. Number Twelve’s wine cellar alone housed more poisons and antique heirlooms of gruesome origin than a Knockturn Alley consignment shop, and in the library he knew there existed select ancient volumes bound in strange leather which when opened with the proper spell detailed numerous and prideful accounts of slaughter—creature hunting, Muggle killings, an exact illustrated methodology of violence so incomprehensible he had thought for much of his adolescence that it was the worst thing he would ever know: looking at Remus in the pale unfogging rime of every exultant dawn and understanding the hell that breathed inside himself, that it could never be wished away. In those days he had wanted the world to be beautiful for Remus and would have burnt something down and/or committed crimes ranging from minor to ten-years-to-life in Azkaban just to make it so—which he _did_ , naively, as if Remus didn’t know better than any of them on the other side of the insurmountable gulf between them that the world didn’t give a fuck whether you lived or you died. Perhaps in the end they were fated to do this together all along and in thinking he was protecting Remus in whatever clumsy, selfish way he’d ever managed he had simply delayed the inevitable; he could no longer believe there was a future for them after this, in the holy Arcadia meant to come after, not when they had both been hollowed and honed for death and death and death. The more he thought about it he couldn’t understand why he was still alive.

In the driver’s seat Remus was nearly strangling the wheel as he passed a semi; he’d sunk in on himself slightly, collapsing dense and livid like a dying star, the way he did sometimes before a fight. “Are you even listening to me?” he was asking. “You can’t possibly—he’ll _make_ you stay there, Sirius, you know he will, and the place will need to be ripped apart before anyone can even walk through the doorway without, I don’t know, getting disemboweled or drowned by the bathtub, it’ll be like you’re trapped inside every bad thing that’s ever happened and I’m not going to leave on whatever death trip he’s going to send me on this time just to worry about when I can get back to you in that fucking house the entire time I’m gone.”

“I’m not fucking asking you to come with me, that’s—”

“Well at least that hasn’t changed,” said Remus, cutting off a severely dented and speeding Econoline van as he switched lanes. Until third year Remus had been too afraid to say no to his friends because he didn’t think he could do it and still have friends afterwards; selfishly Sirius wished he’d retained even a hair-trigger sliver of his old fear because all he ever did now was say no. “So I guess you just expect me to, what, lick your wounds and make sure you’re eating properly in your mausoleum and getting your walkies? Write your eulogy for you?”

“Guess again. When have you ever written eulogies when you could just skip the country instead.”

“Fuck you, Sirius, you’re so—I’m _not_ doing this. We’re going to find a place and ward every forsaken bloody corner of it and then we’re going home until we’re needed. I don’t care who wants what else and that includes you.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want or I want and it never has, don’t you get that? There’s one answer and one way and all that’s left is to live out the fucking pathetic choices we have left until we get there. You can pick any number of ways to get to the center of a spiderweb, Remus, you know that, I know you—it sounds incredibly fucked up to say this but it would probably be the safest place we’ll find, especially with a Secret Keeper, there’s room enough for like twenty people at least and I can, I don’t know, burn some of the family jewels to keep warm.”

“Yes Sirius, why should two people be happy when twenty people can be miserable.”

“I wasn’t aware you were happy,” said Sirius. He’d folded his hands between his knees to hide that they were shaking and for the first time in nearly fourteen years he was craving a cigarette so badly his mind had begun pacing back and forth like a nervous animal wandering from hunger to hunger, allowing himself to stupidly imagine the single most impossible thing in the miserable trajectory of their entire lives: that they would ever go home again. “You’ve got a fucking funny way of showing it.”

“You’ve gotten everything you’ve ever wanted in your entire life and you’ve still never been happy,” said Remus, “so how the hell would you know. I’m not doing this just so you can spend the next few years falling in love with your own tragedy all over again, which is exactly where it would go from here, and then who knows what, you selfish fuck—you’ve already spent twelve years getting your soul-guts sucked out through a bendy straw so I guess this would be, what, your way of saying I told you so? Making me watch this time? Because I see it. I see what you’re trying to do.”

“Don’t fucking worry, I know there’s only room for one protagonist in the tragicomedy of your life and I’d never dream of imposing,” he said, hoarse, his voice rasping like wind over dead leaves. “There’s only you and there’s only ever been you and there’ll only ever be _you_. The war and Harry and me and everyone and every fucking thing else are just collateral. How could I forget.”

Neither of them said anything else in the shrill silence intercut with blaring static from the radio until abruptly Remus pulled off onto an exit—not the one they needed—and merged onto a quiet midday road, his mouth pressed into a fine pale line like a lit fuse when Sirius glanced at him, knowing what he was thinking because it was exactly what Sirius himself had been thinking when he watched Remus from across the flat when one of them came home from another absence smelling like woodsmoke and sweat and pine or someone else’s cigarettes, offering no explanation or apology but the bare fact that they had come back to each other at all in the end. I dare you, Sirius would think, staring at the back of Remus’s head when he’d just come out of the shower after three days away, I fucking dare you to say something. Do it do it do it. On and on and on it went until September, when he woke up one morning and all of Remus’s things were gone because Remus had walked out in the middle of the night, but of course they never said a word about it.

Remus was pulling the car over to the side of the road and Sirius wondered hilariously if he was going to make him get out and walk when he slammed the brakes to the floorboard so hard Sirius likely would’ve made a roadkill feast for the local wildlife if he hadn’t had his seatbelt on. When the car settled he could hear the empty gin bottle in the backseat rattle around with the maps and the unwashed thermos; he rubbed his chest and his neck where the seatbelt had left a red imprint and looked at Remus, who was still staring dead ahead as if nothing had ever happened, or as if it had in fact happened to someone else. There were no other cars on the winding silk-spread of the road and the radio had cut out completely, playing a ceaseless static scream that reminded him with a lightning-bolt shiver of a movie he’d seen about the last survivors of nuclear fallout, but he lost the thread of it as quickly as it came.

“If you have,” Remus was saying, like walking over broken glass, “any regard at all for me, or for what we—if you ever did at all, you won’t bring this up again. If you can’t promise me anything else I want you to promise me that one single thing. Whatever it comes to, if you’ve ever given a shit about me once in our entire lives, you won’t do it again.”

He didn’t promise but Remus didn’t wait for an answer before he started driving again; looking at the crooked spread of the narrow road he wasn’t sure where they were and he doubted Remus was either, the green tidemark of the trees thickening into a forest as he leaned his head against the window and watched the rain finally roll in, blaring out across the sky in dark inky smears, the tree branches bending beneath the sudden crush of it like a wave, the earth bowed in mourning. Another mile or two later they caught the signal again and turned up the radio, unspeaking as they chased the rain towards the east, drawn like an arrow with no map and no compass towards some uncertain path long forgotten, lost together as Sirius supposed they had always been lost together, the gas tank marked full.

—

After a few days of nightmare sleeplessness Sirius took one of Remus’s enormous werewolf sedatives (he had several bottles of them he’d either hoarded or bought via illicit methods, which seemed more likely) while they were leaving a Muggle bed and breakfast near the greenish headwaters of the Nene, shrouded in miles of foliage like a Victorian rendering of Eden at the banks of the Euphrates; he didn’t wake up until they were near Atherstone and the sun was bleeding into the low clouds, the dusty blue-hour gloaming beckoning golden through the trees and the afternoon rainwater and slamming full-force into the headache that throbbed in Gatling-gun bursts as he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes hard enough to see what was possibly another dimension. It felt not dissimilar from waking up after a coke binge, the full-body meat-grinder ache and a head full of sticky marshmallow fluff, his stomach lurching forward in nauseous tidal flux with every movement of the car so horribly he was thinking that maybe the cost of being well-rested wasn’t worth it after all. Jarringly it was also not dissimilar to the comedown-crash in the forbidden forest almost two years ago and it made him want to run as it always did, hunted and starving and swallowed up into the belly of the earth unsure if he was even there at all but for the wardrum-burn of his obsession searing him to the bone, blood tingling through his limbs, _alive, alive, alive_.

“Didn’t I tell you to only take half of one,” Remus was saying as Sirius looked automatically for his reflection in the mirror and then the window only to find nothing in the filmy fog of magic. He thought he remembered Remus telling him to take a whole pill but that was probably the paranoia and/or bitterness coming up for air; sometimes he found himself wondering what he looked like to Remus but especially in these moments, when Remus was the only living thing in all of creation who could see him. “I was afraid I’d have to Enervate you. We’ve got about twenty minutes and you still need to put on your Potions Master face—and try not to look so twitchy this time, Hestia Jones asked me if you were on something the other day.”

Exactly on cue Remus reached for the clear water bottle in which they kept the potion and shoved it at him, the smell of it like rot and bad blood with essence of Snape lurking somewhere in its sludgy depths; he held his breath and drank deeply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and trying dearly to concentrate on the obscure theory of alchemical transmutation at the core of the potion enabling not a brief change in DNA but rather a temporary transfiguration introduced like a virus until the body fought it off, hardly breathing and wondering how he could remember a thing like that but not Remus’s favorite album or James’s voice or Lily’s birthday until he was sure he wasn’t about to puke all over the car, by which time his tattoos had faded and his hair had gone lank and greasy, veins soldered new, bones realigned, skin smoothed flat like canvas over wood. Snape’s feet were too big for his boots and Sirius felt that Snape in Muggle jeans and a flannel was giveaway numbers one through one hundred that something was afoot, but no one had asked and instead—infuriatingly, hysterically—he’d gotten a couple of sickly compliments from people obviously not well-acquainted with the man in question that turned him an ugly shade of puce. Trying to get in the mood and possibly convince himself that any positive reaction was thanks to his brilliant method acting and not Snape he’d made what he thought was a passable attempt at playing it off like a brooding, strung-out frontman in a grunge band, sad about the eyes, wandering endlessly the abyss in which his soul was condemned to an eternity of Promethean evisceration every night, but Remus said it just made him look like a knockoff Robert Smith, and anyway what was Robert Smith without the lipstick. So he stopped.

“You’re looking very vigorous today, Severus,” said Remus, reaching over to squeeze the inside of Sirius’s thigh to really drive the point home. He looked tired but he was smiling, the fine reddish hair at the nape of his neck curling with sweat in the sweeping humidity, his fingernails bitten bloody. “Is there anything I can do to help you get a good night’s sleep for a change? Can I brew you a potion, maybe give you a bit of exercise before bed?”

“If you’re trying to make anything harder than second-year potions someone’s nipples will end up burnt off and we’ll both wind up in a coma somehow,” said Sirius, his voice blurring into Snape’s oily baritone that made everything sound as if it was said with an emphatic spiritual sneer. “But you can have a D for your delivery.” Immediately Remus removed his hand with a face like he’d just swallowed a slug.

They drove on for another ten minutes mostly unspeaking with the radio crackling along softly to a bland, inoffensive college rock station until they pulled into a willowy country lane flanked on both sides by enormous oak trees; it had taken Sirius the entire duration to sift through the muddy ten-ton fog in his head sufficiently enough to remember what they were supposed to be doing, which was attending an information briefing with several other Order members and adjacents at Elphias Doge’s house, who wasn’t yet aware of Sirius’s involvement or the extent of last year’s Snafu (nor were the adjacents), hence the Polyjuice. Afterwards they’d planned to spend the night in the pitchy woods near the Coventry Canal updating their maps with any new dead ends to chase and sharing the last of the pot Remus had procured somewhere around Trowbridge while they wrote lengthy letters they didn’t show each other and browsed the owl-order cassette catalog they’d stolen from someone’s bin, which he secretly liked much better than the anxious, smoke-stale hotel rooms: it all seemed a sort of irrevocable and deafening proof that he existed in the world at all—like there was something still untouched and uncursed in this place, the spreading melodic infinite of the sky and the nighttime noises, the clamor of the stars and the clouds catching the firelight, the woods clinging to his skin and his clothes. There he was just a thing who was bound to another thing like and unlike himself, unborn again, no words yet between them, free of fate and legacy.

He was hoping there wouldn’t be much of a crowd as they walked up the lane, his head still throbbing percussively with persistent hangover warfare as Remus worked through the spell-shield around the house, but when Doge let them in they found an intimidating number of people in the living room and were obliged to introduce themselves to nearly everyone and make small talk with the rest while they waited on Mundungus Fletcher to show up; someone offered him a Bloody Mary which he accepted immediately, listening to Remus (he had one too) try to steer Molly Weasley away from his tragically single status, to little effect. “But Remus, dear,” she was saying, and then—don’t you know, the pause before she said it seemed to say, aren’t I doing you a great kindness, “there are some girls who wouldn’t mind. Of all the nonsense!” Across the table Remus still looked tired but more wan and strained than Sirius had seen him in a while, an unconvincing smile hanging like tightrope on his lips, though most people wouldn’t notice unless they were looking for it, as that meant you’d have to really know Remus, and few people ever did. Long ago he’d perfected the art of deflection and reflection, smoothing his face into someone more mirror than man where people saw a carefully constructed fairy tale full of noble suffering and similar bullshit and filled in the blanks with whatever they wanted to see; strange, to be jealous of it now that he knew he’d never have as much practice at being a Good Convict as Remus had had at being a Good Werewolf. Under his shirt Sirius remembered his ribs were still bruised from the full moon a week ago in almost the same place where he himself had a long wolf’s-tooth cut scabbing over into a numb sepia scar that Remus hadn’t offered to heal.

The lone beautiful, glittering perk of being Snape was that he could be a rude, dismissive, malicious asshole to absolutely anyone and no one would bat an eye because it was so perfectly in keeping with character, which Kingsley Shacklebolt had congratulated him on a week previous and which was serving him well now given the lingering headache-churning and his abject agony at having to do anything tonight that didn’t involve eating a huge dinner—he’d only had a piece of toast with the sedative before they left the bed and breakfast and the blissful nothing ensued—and listening to the new Pavement tape an owl had finally dropped on his head just as they were heading out that morning, hopefully with more alcohol after they finished the last of the pot. Most everyone gave him a wide berth and he was starting to feel vaguely human again even in the snakeskin he was wearing when Fletcher showed up with the last of the adjacents and shattered the fragile egg shell of his disoriented but improving good vibe with the kind of hysterical coincidence that could only manifest in his egregious bullshit life: among them was Aoife Frobisher, who Sirius had dated towards the end of seventh year and into the first few months after graduation. What fresh hell is this, he thought, shaking her hand with a hallucinatory exhaustion and wondering if Dumbledore/God/Merlin/Morgana/the universe were playing an elaborate game of chance with his life as he remembered with a feverish, residual kind of panic July or August ‘78, when she’d Flooed him in the middle of the night having a pregnancy scare so severe (he’d idiotically taken no precautions himself and at the time she’d foregone the potion for a spell, which was technically a curse but which, while appealingly badass and ritualistic, was completely useless if not performed within the exact hour of the appropriate lunar phase) Sirius had spent the rest of the night swiveling from an apocalyptic panic attack to chainsmoking to tearing out half his hair at the thought of having inadvertently passed on to an innocent his genes, his last name, his questionable impulse control, and every single unfixable unforgivable fucked-up thing that was wrong with him, inherited and otherwise, as well as the prospect of trying to help her brew a complicated miscarriage potion. Remus, who’d been sleeping on Sirius’s couch in between cold water flats, had said it served them both right and then taken off before it registered and the subsequent explosive fight could materialize.

Feeling flattened by the ghosts of indiscretions past he looked up to find Remus watching him from the other side of the room with a funny washed-off look on his face as Doge started talking, still nursing half his drink; unbidden he remembered that Remus had never liked Aoife, which she had noticed enough to mention on several terse occasions, but when Sirius questioned him about it he just said, well, she’s _your_ girlfriend, leaving him somewhat mystified until they broke up and it stopped mattering. By then he knew Remus was queer and suspected Remus understood the same of him on some level, though they had never talked about it until the first winter after Hogwarts, when he’d gone round to Gideon Prewett’s flat in Lambeth and found Remus there with his hair tangled wildly, wearing the fisherman’s sweater he’d borrowed from Sirius without asking and not much else. A week later he brought Gideon home after a Christmas party and sucked red rosebud-bruises over the fading hickies on his neck and his belly and the insides of his thighs, wondering with a distant pang of fascination how Remus had explained the scars or if perhaps Gideon knew, which seemed unlikely. Not long after Remus had claimed to hate Gideon for reasons that always remained unclear seemingly even to himself, although he never let an insignificant thing like that stop him from sleeping with him.

More and more he felt less like a shipwreck and more like a one-man _Mary Celeste_ , all the parts in working order with nothing left inside except rust and memory, fine at a distance but bled of life when you got too close. Hollowed—levelled flat, scorched-earth raw. All zero at the bone. From his cell window he would listen to the interminable lullaby chorus of the waves trying to find some piece of himself to hold onto like driftwood, hearing in the echo of it a colorless blur of names and voices and bone-china fragments of songs or poems or old conversations he would then tattoo with an old scrap of metal anywhere he could reach, trying to find his way home on the inept map of his own skin, blood spiderwebbed screaming red and dizzying across his arms and his legs and his chest like a star chart until at last he managed to transfigure it into ink and the smell of it made him dry heave as he pressed his fingers into the new swollen roadmap of it to read himself the way he remembered reading runes on class trips to Tintagel and Dinas Emrys. Even now he sometimes found a strange comfort in them and followed the crooked branches of the lines like a clock or slow-water tributaries leading into rivers like a dog circling the ground before it laid down but his skin now was smoothed over into a pale unlived-in empty page he couldn’t read; whenever anything requiring his (Snape’s) attention came up he grunted his nasally assent and interjected a few overly long, snide remarks that sounded like he’d practiced them in front of a mirror with a thesaurus in hand (also in character) and sort of forced everything else back down into the cracked, worn, overflowing compartment of himself where he kept the simmering emotional Molotovs along with every other extremely flammable thing he meant to deal with later and never did. London had come up no less than four times since he’d been counting; Molly’s daughter had sat down next to him for some reason; he had half an hour before he’d have to go back out to the car and take another dose of Polyjuice, which he’d been dearly hoping he wouldn’t have to do.

At the other end of the room Remus was looking at him almost softly every time he met his eyes so that even when Sirius turned away and pretended to pay attention to the conversation again he could feel his glance lingering like the afterimage of a spell jangling up his spine, following him as he excused himself to the car to swallow another revolting mouthful and again when he came back inside again after dragging his feet up the lane, pinning him, mothwings to cork board. Shadowboxer, Sirius thought, resentment crackling like ball lightning, but then maybe he only meant it to convey some shared understanding, like I’m here, or look at me, or I see you, although it hardly felt any better. As the conversation finally wound down to dregs people began leaving quickly with their secrets and their purpose clutched close (Aoife thankfully among them) he heard Doge tell Remus that he was going up to London tomorrow to have a pointed conversation with Amelia Bones and watched Remus’s center of gravity drop like he was trying to physically will himself though time and space into another dimension, which Sirius could’ve told him fucking well wouldn’t work, having been trying for the better part of fifteen years by now via incantation and ritual and half-assed self-vivisection and oneiromancy and bargaining of his soul to assorted deities and monstrosities alike, which he reckoned was worthless given the moth-bitten, evaporated skeletal starvation of what was even left of the thing.

“Do you ever feel like we’re living in an episode of _Twin Peaks_?” Molly’s daughter—Ginny, he remembered after a heartbeat, who Harry had mentioned no less than eight times in his last novel-length letter, very sweetly and very awed by her entire existence—was talking to him. He tried not to startle too obviously, or to twitch away from her for fear of leaving some filthy malignant mark on her by virtue of proximity. “Less the sinister small-town intrigue and mystery and more like, we’re part of some prophetic dream someone else had and now we’re living it out. But with a small-town mentality to go with it, I mean.”

“It’s definitely heavier on the apocalyptic dread and not so much the romantic conspiracy,” he said. “Or I’ve heard. I still haven’t watched it but Remus has been telling me I need to.”

“Now that I think about it maybe that doesn’t work so well after all, but it sounded good in my head,” said Ginny. Her hair was so red it was like a cauterizing flame summoned from memory, almost enough to make him forget everything else, even his own un-body; looking at them like this sometimes he felt sick—all of them children, not much younger than they had been, though he could hardly remember being that young. Realizing as he often did that Harry and Ron and Hermione had already lived more than half the life James and Lily had made him feel like the ground was moving beneath his feet such that he couldn’t catch his breath. “It all feels so stupid really. And sad, and terrifying, and unfair. But mostly stupid.”

How to tell a fourteen-year-old girl who understands fear more acutely than any fourteen-year-old girl ever should that it is never going to stop feeling that way. “I think that’s how it’s supposed to feel. But we’re prepared, you know, as much as—it’ll be shorter than the last time and we know better how to keep you safe,” he said instead, pitifully, staring down at his blank white hands knotted together in his lap and hardly believing it. “I’m hoping it’ll be like ripping off a huge bandage with minimal carnage.”

“Was that what everyone hoped the first time around, too?”

“I’m not sure we ever got that far,” he said, “or if we ever did I didn’t see it.” From the open window he could hear voices murmuring where the oak on the lawn stretched across the grass like a claw, shivering blue in the shadows.

They left before either one of them was tempted to drink any more and took the sinuous country roads to the deep forest to the north, where they stopped for falafel and baba ghanoush before they parked the car and pitched the tent among the cover of some low-hanging honeysuckle and flowering brambles for the night while Sirius rode out the last few minutes of the transformation, breathing hard through his nose as his skin began crawling, candle-wax-melting, everything inside him shaken up like champagne in a bottle until he felt his own skin settle around him with a final jackknife shiver; when he looked down he could see his spidery fingers and his coalstone hair in his eyes and the tattoos marked like sundial-shadows, the inept collage of himself unscrolling in the lanternlight. Remus was eating an olive and watching him in what struck Sirius as a sort of vengeful recompense for all the years of seeing him unravel out of himself on the full moon nights and the mornings after, staring at the spot where his fingers made indents over the 24.2.81 on his forearm, though he’d forgotten what it meant long ago, any significance burnt clean in his memory. Cracking his spine he rummaged for the blue kettle in their things to make tea, knowing any sleep before midnight at least was a loss after the all-day blackout and trying to think of how to broach the obvious subject without setting off a Markov chain of screaming arguments guaranteed to end with one or both of them accumulating new and unforgivable emotional wounds and a total inability to talk to each other about anything even more severely than they already couldn’t; biding his time he took a dolma from the styrofoam box they were sharing and feigned deep interest in the water-stained copy of _The Quibbler_ they’d picked up at the magic shop in town, which contained a study of questionable methods suggesting that there were nargles inside him at this very moment making a nest in his sinus cavity.

He set the tea brewing with a jolting static thrill of electricity murmured under his breath and sat back against the pillows with Remus, who was rewinding a cassette and trying badly to mend a hole in his jeans with the same spool of red thread he used on everything else that needed fixing; the years hung off him like a patchwork mosaic cobbled together from thrift stores and his father’s secondhand sweaters, shirts stolen from hookups or brief roommates, a pair of loafers he’d bought for Hogwarts he often wore without socks, showing both ankles under his cuffed jeans. His hair curling slightly at the nape of his neck. An oddly expensive-looking watch of unknown origin on his left wrist. On the occasions Sirius actually looked in the mirror for long enough to recognize himself he thought he could pass for one of the whiskey- or heroin-sloshed frontmen from a punk band they might’ve gone to see for cheap at London pubs back in the ‘70s or very early ‘80s, finger-combed hair, high cheekbones and dark arched brows, his own jeans stolen still wet from a clothesline in Cumbria, sloe-eyed and sad—the type who made two or maybe three albums and then burnt out like a supernova, disappeared, died in obscurity writing doomsday poetry on bar napkins. He wondered if Remus still had any of his old things at home in Somerset, clothes or albums or books or letters, though it seemed unlikely given that all Remus had offered were recommendations of books published and albums and films made in the interim wasting years and a few sparse photo albums, which seemed to require a certain level of drunkenness before he would even bring them out with all their glaring blanks Remus never bothered to explain, and didn’t really need to. Remus had never been sentimental, especially not about things: it had to be mined out of him layer by layer, memory by sanctified memory, struck at the very center of the labyrinthian cartography that was his soul, but half the time what he found there was still so frustratingly oblique—a single word, an unearthed fragment of tender, mummified laughter—it left him high and dry and hungrier, always, always, than before.

There must be something, he thought, some scrap of him kept under a loose floorboard or between the pages of an old book taken out and nursed like a flame cupped in his hands or a gun to the temple as proof that any of it had been real at all, feeling the absence calcified and hollow inside himself where the memory was too deadly and too blinding to hold close in the light of day. But the more he thought about it he realized it was the sort of thing he probably would’ve done himself, exactly the impoverished, emotionally fucked gesture he’d have taken to bed every night and gorged himself on until it was in his blood like disease, like heritage. Remus would lie in bed too sick and too cold and too wounded to get up and turn on the heat, and then in the morning he’d torch everything. Or else he’d just leave.

September ‘81—when he woke up and realized Remus had walked out sometime in the night—he went looking for his first pressing of _Marquee Moon_ to put on the record player as he did almost daily by then and found that it was missing, along with a couple others of no value (Wire’s _154_ was the only one he could remember now) as well as his copies of _From Ritual to Romance_ and _A Season in Hell_ ; when he went to make coffee he discovered that all the tea, chocolate, whiskey, and the best of the peaches were also gone, though somewhat ominously Remus had left the last of the pomegranate seeds in a bowl in the fridge, which Sirius launched outside onto the street for the pigeons rather than finish them himself. Also taken was the pot Sirius had kept in his sock drawer and two of his flannel shirts, including the red one Remus wore nearly as often as he did, and with a livid, betrayed insanity he wondered if it still smelled like him, and where he was, and whether he’d eaten today, and hoped rabidly that _Marquee Moon_ paid for three months’ rent and groceries wherever he was staying as much as he hoped some rich asshole collector gave him just a raw enough deal that it paid for a ticket someplace where Sirius would never have to see him again. As those last weeks bled on he could feel the hollow places in himself beginning to grow and freeze over, darkness into darkness, fear feeding fear feeding fear, but it was always worse when he came home to the flat with all its new empty spaces where something was meant to be: Remus’s books on the shelf or the tea he hadn’t replaced in the kitchen or the stacks of paper for whatever crackpot writing job Remus had found and/or scathing magical theory essay he was working on, their dirty laundry thrown together in the hamper, two cups, two chairs, Remus’s old trunk that doubled as a second coffee table, the shapes of them like running his tongue over missing teeth or constant phantom-limb pain where he could feel the numb bloodless chalk outline of what had belonged there. Permanent placeholders—an articulated anatomy of loss, each absence a bone or a tendon that ached beneath the horrible unweight of it.

Altogether it was a very similar scarred-over vacancy to what he’d felt for the two years he’d been out of Azkaban trying to remember the meat back onto his bones. So much of him had evaporated or been atomized or eaten away that some days the world manifested as a terrible swallowing gulf pulling at him magnetically no matter how much he ate or what he listened to or spoke or didn’t speak or felt or moved or breathed or loved or hated; he would never feel full again but unlike the kiss he would always be aware of it like walking with a limp from an old wound or a gnawing screaming hunger sawing at his gut as an approximation of the real thing. Everything was a gap, pulled up by the roots, burst soul-seams. More and more he thought of Remus as a pause, though it wasn’t much different from how he’d thought of Remus sometimes when they were shivering together in the Shack or sharing a joint on the couch in London late at night and nothing really seemed to fit. You are _____. We are _____. I am _____ and this is _____ I want _____. Skips in his head shuffling along a familiar playout groove like a song or a voice speaking from somewhere deep inside himself, like the blood moving through his own heart: a word, a word, a word.

“The latest theory is that nargles are kind of like thestrals,” said Remus, reading the cover of _The Quibbler_ , which Sirius had stopped paying attention to midway through skimming an article about dragon’s blood tree sap in the water supply turning everyone into mindless drones. Over his bottom lip Sirius could see the glint of his eyeteeth. “You can only see them if you believe, or if they decide you’re worthy, or something like that.”

“James swore he saw them once on the Astronomy Tower. Sixth year? Or seventh.”

“James was also doing a lot of peyote he stole from the potions closet.” When Remus started changing into the oversized blue shirt he slept in Sirius turned away; they’d lost any residual awkwardness at seeing each other naked by the time they were fifteen but so help him he still changed with his back to Remus at night and got dressed as soon as he woke up in the milky frosted glass dawn after the full moon nights, pretending he couldn’t feel Remus watching him, pretending he couldn’t smell them both on his clothes. “His daughter—Lovegood’s—she’s a year younger than Harry. One of the weirdest students I had but maybe predictably very bright—she’s friends with Ginny Weasley. She’s the one who gave me the article about the thestral-nargle connection her dad wrote but you and I can both see thestrals so I’m not convinced of the methodology there.”

“She was asking me about the war. Ginny was. I didn’t really know what to tell her,” he said, adding too much cream to Remus’s tea and probably not enough whiskey. “Do you ever just look at them and realize—they’ve lived nearly as much as James and Lily ever did? Or Dorcas and Marlene? And it’s just, Jesus, they’re even younger than we were.”

“Harry looks so much like James I swear it felt like being yanked straight out of a memory by the roots sometimes. It was like picking at a scab that never healed,” said Remus, not looking at him, perhaps thinking that he had deserved the spiritual sting every time he saw the kid’s face. Neatly he folded his shirt into the expandable duffel bag they were sharing. “True to form he puts off his homework for as long as possible to go play quidditch. I don’t think Binns has ever stopped calling him James. It got to the point I tried to avoid him in the staff room because it was so, just, it never stopped feeling like someone just threw cold water on me.”

“I used to wonder what Binns was like when he was alive. He looks like the kind of guy who ate plain oatmeal every single morning and had scheduled missionary sex at nine p.m. on Sundays.”

“You always could peg people,” said Remus, though Sirius saw him smile. “Do I look like that now that I’ve been a teacher?”

“No, you look like you have eggs twice a week and probably haven’t gotten laid in a year.”

“Six months,” said Remus, smiling wider now, “and I keep thinking I should work out some kind of concrete plan to seduce Kingsley once things settle a bit but I feel like he’d appreciate a more direct approach, you know? He strikes me as a very gin and meaningful eye contact across the table sort of man.”

“He was impressed with my Snape a while back.”

“Was he.”

“Maybe you could start off talking about the finer points of Polyjuice and go from there,” said Sirius, “or bring the conversation around to your theory about Snape’s dick and why we don’t make Polyjuice specifically for the potential to achieve eleven-inch cocks, but that might be a little too direct.”

“Supposedly someone invented a spell for that and they’re actually trying to fucking patent it,” Remus said, laughing. He reached across Sirius and poured tea for both of them with less cream than Sirius customarily took but plenty of whiskey, so he didn’t mention it. “No doubt some insecure pureblood with a persecution complex. That’s really all of them, though.”

Knowing it was true and he probably deserved to hear it but also recognizing it for bait Sirius took a sip of his tea and immediately added more whiskey. “Do they still do that bullshit where they have Draught of the Living Death in the curriculum but refuse to teach birth control potions? Or spells?”

“Still. For something that’s only, what, three ingredients—”

“Four.”

“Well I wouldn’t know. It’s supposed to be as simple as making a cup of tea or one of those poison-reversal potions but girls have to buy their own ingredients from Hogsmeade and put it together themselves, and they can’t get any version of the emergency thing until they’re sixteen because some of the ingredients are restricted. So they have to have a doctor’s approval for the pre-made versions—Minerva said it’s international law. But from what I understood mostly because of your fuck-up the spells are so time-sensitive anyway it’s not a good idea unless you’re committed.”

Choosing to ignore that one too Sirius decided now was a good time to change and pulled on the Breeders t-shirt Remus had given him to sleep in, which in turn had been given to Remus by a sort-of ex in Dublin, though Sirius was fairly certain “given” was a nice word for taking it outright when he had left; idiotically he wondered if Remus had ever fucked him in it, smelling on it the lavender oil Remus put in the washer the way Sirius used to, and old sweat and smoke and warm skin, and knew he probably had. All along the bare uncharted arch of his spine and his rib-rungs he could feel Remus looking as well as if he’d reached out and touched him, fingers spread in the butterfly-splay of his shoulder blades and his knuckles in the laddered staircase-curve of his backbone, almost lyrical in the orchestrated movement of it, sweet like a needle on vinyl, his heart rising to it as if it had been waiting, shaking percussively against his bones and into Remus’s fingers, shaking, shaking. What did Remus even see when he looked at him? A Pensieve full of memory and bated breath, evidence of every shattering loss—a sad fuck with bad tattoos and sucking gaps in his head and his body like bruised fruit? A cartography to somewhere forgotten, or long gone, made illegible in its nightmare wanderings through hell—an apocalyptic warning sign in a dead language, left on something ruinous. With his back turned Sirius could still feel him staring the way he had across the room at Doge’s even when he jerked his shoulder to try and throw it off like a cobweb or an itch but when he was dressed and turned around again Remus was sorting through his cassettes as if he’d never been watching him at all, leaving him bereft and angry and relieved and yet unable, somehow, to suppress the shiver that hissed all the way through the cords of his body in rubber-band vibrations the way he used to feel before when he came home to an empty flat and found a cold spot in the room.

As a peace offering for transgressions he still couldn’t understand but mostly to change the subject to keep from thinking too hard about them he opened the other styrofoam box with two diamonds of baklava in the center and only one plastic fork, which he shoved into Remus’s lap as a pathetic and wordless attempt to placate, though likely he heard the command in it anyway: Here, stop bitching. “Who do you think I am,” Remus asked. There was something tight and quashed in his face that looked like hurt or reproach or both but he held out the fork and let Sirius take the first bite; still he wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong, and if he asked Remus he knew he’d either act like it never happened or the aftermath of the ensuing fight would leave one of them (likely Sirius) cleaning their open wounds in the car for the rest of the night, which was assuming he wasn’t imagining the entire thing and/or Remus even knew what the hell he was put off about and had been put off about since they were roughly fourteen years old, thus he sat resolutely back against the far vinyl wall of the tent again and forced his rigid muscles to relax, both of them barefoot, tongues heavy with honey, and awkwardly played with the Walkman until Remus poured more whiskey into their empty mugs and—as if Sirius had asked him to—put in _Wowee Zowee_.

“For the record,” Remus was saying, reaching around the back of Sirius’s neck to hook the headphone around his ear, “I do like you better when you’re not Severus.”

“That’s really special Remus, thanks. You’ll work your way up to a compliment in another decade if you keep at it.”

“I wasn’t trying for one anyway. But I do wish Albus had left us the ingredients instead of having Snape take care of it all. That would’ve been better.”

“I’m willing to believe you learned a lot in like, thirteen years, obviously you did, but I know you couldn’t make Polyjuice if your mortal soul and Kingsley Shacklebolt’s arms were at stake.”

“No, I quit potions after fifth year, remember? But you could do it. We could just use strands of each other’s hair.” Remus’s breath was warm beside him and his hair smelled like the shampoo they’d been sharing, and very whisperingly he caught the scent of cheap incense; his knuckles grazed Sirius’s knee when he pressed play on the Walkman, spidery finger-holds thrumming against his skin until the guitar jangled sadsweet in his ear and echoed with an unearthly crescendo down the wires of his body like a pure unfettered current of déjà vu. “It wouldn’t help with anything we actually need to do, but it’d be nice, you know, just to try.”

“So then, what, I could be you and you could be me,” said Sirius, as if it made no difference. Even as he said it he could feel a shiver like a ghost at the base of his spine and hoped Remus wouldn’t notice, but then he felt the spreading kinetic pulse of it blur into Remus beside him and knew they had had the same thought, the same strange telepathic cloud extending between them beyond all reason and logical explanation. Before—now, still—he remembered Remus would sometimes put on an album he’d just been thinking about, or vocalize something he had just been thinking, or otherwise Sirius would wake on the darkest nights to find Remus sitting at the foot of his bed, summoned by dreams; and London, he remembered, and every song he wanted to hear. He was no longer convinced it was coincidence, or not entirely, this bleeding-raw unkillable thing stretching molten and viscous into every recess, but how could you possibly live so long with someone else’s very existence as the constant cyclical meditation of your own without finding splinters of them in every part of you. Yet if he put his hand on Remus’s chest now he was certain their heartbeats would be the same; he was certain, somewhere in the grist of his very soul, that he could keep time with it. “Would it even help?”

“With the communication breakdown or the imparting a decade of time and life to someone who was sort of blown out for twelve years?”

“I was thinking more like, understanding the why and what of it all. Of you, mostly. But that works too.”

“There’s not really that much of me left, I don’t think.”

“Shut up. I thought by now you’d have stopped acting like you’re mentally composing the world’s saddest poem—it’s very expertly manipulative by the way, nice job—you know, every time someone thinks you’re a human being worth knowing. Or at least you’d have learned to lie better.”

“I am a good fucking liar, you’ve just been around me long enough to know when I’m doing it,” said Remus. “You and maybe Albus. Though Albus has never had much use for anything but the parts he needs when he needs them, like I’m a werewolf and you’re the most wanted man in England.”

“Did you ever manage to get away from him for long?”

“I went into the Libyan Desert a couple of times. He sent hippogriffs.”

“I always wanted to see that. The desert, I mean, I’ve seen enough hippogriff for probably three lifetimes, no offense to Buckbeak, I love him madly.”

“We can travel when our lives are relatively our own again. You used to talk about seeing the American deserts too. You’d like them.”

So help him he already knew the answer but he still asked: “Were you ever going to tell him? I mean _really_ tell him about the dog last year when you knew by then I was hiding in the forest, probably drinking unicorn blood for all you knew.”

“It’s not like it could’ve cursed you any more than you already are.”

“You either.”

“True enough.”

Feeling woozy Sirius turned up the volume mostly to keep from hearing his thoughts run screaming head-first into brick walls and then burst like popcorn kernels in a Muggle microwave, feeling all of sixteen fucking years old behind the bed curtains in the dormitory when he and James or else all four of them would crowd together on one of their beds with food from the kitchens and a joint James usually had the foresight to pre-roll, or later on the Astronomy Tower late at night with Remus, which stretched out with a puzzling intensity onto the couch of his Camden flat or sometimes his bed after one of them came home from something else they couldn’t talk about and put on a record instead, their hips and their fingertips touching; he remembered very rarely they had held each other in the foyer or in the bathroom, usually after one of their friends had been killed or on those occasions when one of them thought the other had been among the dead, by which point they had long stopped pretending they hadn’t been up half the night crying. On clear nights like this he and Remus would sometimes leave the flat and walk stoned along Regent’s Canal in those hallowed days when they didn’t have to think about whether they’d survive a walk around the block and back, watching their reflections blur together on the surface of the water, his face which was Remus’s face refracting under the lamplight. Those nights together had never lost their texture in Sirius’s mind even after Azkaban: velvety, smoke-dusky, shot through with insomniac indulgence and the neon night-music of the city, how it felt to make Remus laugh, though he could never remember exactly what he’d said to coax it out. On weekends they made frittata or bought rugelach from the bakery across the road and saw early films at the Muggle cinema or visited the row of consignment shops and the record store and the street markets a few blocks over where they’d buy cheap gifts for each other for no reason, watching the smile pull at Remus’s lips while he stole sideways glances at him, the familiar, skittish satisfaction that came from making him happy setting something alight all along his nerves: _See what I can do_. With a sudden elemental jolt he realized for possibly the first time just how often they had been together. One Sunday in spring or summer ‘79 as they were walking to the tube station from Columbia Road Remus had given him a cutting of a calla lily.

He wanted impossibly to give Remus something now and wished he was three hundred miles away again just so he could show his face in Muggle record stores and send him a bargain-bin cassette or one of the novelty mugs he’d seen at yard sales just to know Remus would get that look Sirius could sometimes put on his face without always knowing how he’d done it, like he’d just thrown all the lights on inside every ancient rafter of his heart or his soul. He wanted to leave Remus and wander the face of the earth until he came back to him with the last frozen tundra rose or crawl back to him on his knees with the desert rain cupped in his hands and beg his forgiveness or vow something, the same thing he thought they had been swearing to each other since the train in 1961, the thing that was perhaps the sacrosanct covenant of their very birth, in sickness and in health, in death which could not do them part, amen. How terrifying, how miraculous, how utterly fucking useless, to want to make this sad beastly horrorshow world beautiful for someone. Opening his eyes again he felt almost dizzy with the stumbling-and-falling sensation that came from waking suddenly: the sense of loss, of discovering that your heart was subject to gravity just like the rest of you.

Against his shoulder Remus turned his head so that his nose was in Sirius’s neck again, sniffing out the pulse. Very quietly he sighed, then said, softly, “No. And I think you already know that so I don’t know why you even asked.”

“I did think so but it’s just, I just wanted to hear you say it.”

“God. Fuck you.” Remus reached between then and turned down the volume, then straightened the headphones, which were stretched as far as they could go without magic. “More like you wanted to make me say it. Which is hilarious, that I keep falling for it, given that no one can make _you_ do anything.”

“You can,” he said, “obviously, you tell me to sit and I’m like a fucking dog learning to heel.” Which was not at all what Remus meant and he heard it in his laugh, like a thorn underneath his skin. Tit for tat, he was saying, his ankle hooked over Sirius’s as an ungentle anchor against claiming he had to go and piss or get something out of the car. “I wish Dumbledore didn’t have to know. I honestly wish no one had to know because it was like—Moony, this is going to come out weird.”

“You _are_ weird. I don’t mind.”

“It just feels like the one thing, or maybe a symptom of everything else, you know? Like it’s only mine, it’s this—I never wanted anyone else to know because it’s the same thing as someone seeing your whole soul, or at least part of it, and it was for you, I mean, the entire thing was because of you. Having everyone else know is like everyone seeing me naked, or staring at me when I wake up in the middle of the night.” He felt like he was dreaming himself saying it; when he didn’t continue he tried to turn up the volume again but Remus, god damn him, pressed his knuckles into the branching pulsepoint at the inside of his wrist, divining something there like a soothsayer listening for signs in the delicate spell of his blood. “It’s something secret but more than secret, is what I’m saying. Sacred, in a way. Some, I don’t know, a kind of fucking transformative patronus I achieved by asking myself stupid meditative questions and keeping mandrake leaves in my mouth for a month. Maybe this really would be easier with Polyjuice.”

“Or if we could just pretend to be other people for a while. But I’m not sure that’d work either because we can talk around each other for miles without actually getting anywhere. And you do love your own suffering.”

“Fuck you, I don’t. At least no more than you do.”

“Sorry,” said Remus, shrugging and sounding very much not. He had a way of seeing himself as divinely justified in everything he said or did no matter how shitty it truly was; for a few short stretches when they were younger Sirius had hated him for it, especially when he was right. “To be completely honest with you I wish no one else knew, too. I always thought it’d be just, only ours, I guess. It was—it felt like the last part of you that was mine. And then it wasn’t.”

“I can’t tell if it’s all in my head. Both of our heads.”

“Neither can I,” said Remus. His eyes closed, like it hurt him.

“Or if we both made it up, or if time added this weird layer to it in between everything or it’s just another hole eaten out of my head. Whatever’s left of it at any rate.”

“There’s plenty of you left so stop it. If I still have anything left of me at all then so do you, whether you’ll listen to me or not, and anyway I know you don’t like to shatter your own mystique.”

“You are,” said Sirius, pausing for effect but mostly to finish his whiskey, “inscrutable. You’re the most impossible—nothing about you is legible. Like you’re this ancient runic script full of warnings and secrets and all this guarded complexity and, alright, yes, the hell-on-earth suffering, and I’m fluent in all of it but there are these completely untranslatable parts I can’t read, or I can read them and look at them but I can’t understand what they mean. No one ever scratches the surface with you and if they do you just fill it in with something else.”

“The only people who ever have or will at this point are either dead or they’re currently waxing poetic about it. Or Albus, though we’ve established that he’s very selective about it. Since we’re using our metaphors I’ve always felt like you’re sort of an open book, or you want to give the impression that you’re an open book, and in fact some of your pages are falling out but you’re not really. You’re so—sometimes I’d think it should be so much easier with you but it never was. I never could get you to hold still for long enough.”

“Would it have mattered?”

“Does anything matter now? Except that we keep paying for each other’s mistakes.”

“Is that poetry?”

“No, that’s me.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Like you don’t have the mother of all tendencies for dramatics. Especially when it was completely contrived or at least half your own fault.”

“Lest anyone fucking forget you’re the only person in the world with _real_ problems.”

“Until the end, I was. You had James, you had the Potters, you had a job and your own flat and you never had to worry about whether you could afford three meals a day and no problem pulling anyone you wanted obviously—it worked out fine for you,” said Remus. He realized he’d been biting the inside of his cheek for the last few minutes and suddenly tasted the livid red spill of blood on his tongue, bursting like a bad memory, bruising like history; what was worse was that Remus wasn’t exactly wrong. Nothing was bigger or more important or more holy than Remus’s pain just like nothing was bigger or more important or more holy than Sirius’s feelings; in that they were a matched set, hurt for hurt, hunger for insatiable hunger, a perverse ouroboros unable to stop eating its own tail. “I felt like a dead limb. Just a, a fucking disembodied limb after amputation waiting for the incinerator or whatever. There was nothing left, you don’t—I didn’t have anything, I didn’t have anyone, anything I was ever lucky enough to fall into always got taken away, usually sooner rather than later.”

It was the nth time in a month they’d had this exact conversation, which usually progressed to a fight with the predictable expansive dagger-green shadow of gathering rainclouds like an evil omen, but he was so bored of the familiar ruptured circuitry of these arguments he couldn’t even make his mouth move; it was exhausting. Remus was exhausting. They were exhausting. He could hardly even stand the sound of his own voice in his head and adjusted the headphone on his left ear tighter in a hopeless attempt to burn it out that did absolutely nothing but make the lit fuse in his gut flare like a matchstrike, seething and inflammatory, wondering if maybe it really didn’t matter anymore, and after all nothing would be settled by them as nothing had been settled by them the first time; if they lived through this, then they could scream at each other for weeks if they wanted about the cicatrice tattoos of every wound neither of them could rectify until they burned something down with the voltaic overflow of their magic like a cleansing bonfire, but he no longer believed either of them would survive. Hope had a way of getting in your eyes like smoke: you never saw the teeth glistening in the dark right behind you.

Suck it up, he was telling himself. Suck it up, choke it down, bury it deep. Forget it. Don’t take it to heart. Bury it deep and leave it alone. Was that what had Remus been telling himself, he wondered, a cold bright jolt, since he was five years old?

“What song is this?” he asked instead. The sound of it—lullaby-blue, a jilted and cauterizing sort of irreverence—crept into his heart-lines like foxfire.

“‘Pueblo,’” said Remus, reading it off the back of the cassette case. “I think this is definitely their stupidest album. And also their most honest.”

“I think it’s maybe their best,” said Sirius, “technically speaking. It’s very beautiful. And very sad. I wish we could hear it at your house, the way you used to—remember? In the summers, when your parents would leave for the evening and we’d get stoned and put something on your mum’s record player in the living room and it’d always be raining.”

They had gone outside in it, he remembered, on the hottest days of the year, lying on the sun-scorched grass where they could hear the music careening through the front windows until the fever-heat broke and the rain finally tore open the bold charcoal-smudge of the Somerset sky, soaking their clothes like they were coming back to life again with the wilted leaves and the parched red earth, glory, glory, trailing water all through the back door and into the kitchen, where they took their clothes off before they could do any more damage, their bare skin prickling with the thundercloud electricity all the way upstairs. For fourteen years he had forgotten.

“Tomorrow you can take some Polyjuice and we can go to the record store and get some curry for dinner,” said Remus, smiling crookedly. “Maybe we could see a movie if we have time.” Tomorrow they were supposed to secure a potions stockpile in southern Derbyshire and then run a series of errands outside Leicester culminating in another grail-chase for a safe house on a tip from Emmeline Vance, which was likely unusable given the extreme amount of warding and magical earthworking they’d have to undertake (it was Muggle and very old and the foundation was crumbling), but it was possible Dumbledore might in all his puppetmaster omniscience repurpose it. “I’d like that. It’ll be something to look forward to for when we go home.” Before Sirius could say anything Remus pressed closer so that they were in the same fog together; he swore he could almost hear the music in his other ear as if they’d melted together, the shifting tissue of time and memory and imagining fused between them like taffy: Sirius and Remus. Remus and Sirius. Inside and outside. North and south. Known and unknown. You and I. “Their other records both made me think of you but maybe especially _Slanted and Enchanted_. When I first heard it—that’d be about three years ago now—I was living in Manitoba doing part-time liaison work for one of the schools and glorified pest control on the side and all I could think about was how much you’d have loved it. I listened to it kind of obsessively for a month and then I smashed the cassette on some rocks when I was hiking.”

“It’s funny, I guess—the next one made me think of you as soon as I heard it.” Sirius had heard first it at a record store in Málaga last year where no one really knew his face and thus he could show it in public, briefly and gleefully; he’d asked the cashier twice in bad, halting Spanish how old it was and was surprised when she said it had only come out that winter. He swore he had heard it before—a familiar, fluent strain of longing—he was not sure he hadn’t been summoned by the sound of it alone. At night he laid on the beach listening to the cassette he’d bought with Dumbledore’s money, drunk and bereft and thinking about sending it to Remus with one of the enormous three-page letters he kept writing on accident and then burning, but he reckoned Remus already had it. “When I was—no, how would you say this? Before I ran away from home to wallow in artistically disheveled languor and disownment—”

To his surprise Remus looked awkward, or just weary, or at least Sirius thought so from the corner of his eye where he could see the bite of his glare; this was royally pushing it and he knew it. “I wasn’t going to say anything—”

“Anyway my parents didn’t want anything Muggle in the house, obviously they didn’t, so I had to sneak in any records or—really anything they didn’t want, until I stopped caring. But in the summers I’d smuggle in whatever I could and I’d listen to it knowing you’d probably already heard it and get jealous that you’d had it for so much longer. And that I couldn’t know you sooner.”

“You were a spoiled pureblood who never understood the entire concept of sacrifice until it was too late and you couldn’t even be jealous for the right reasons. And you still take too long in the shower.”

“I’m a work in progress.”

“And fortunately you have redeeming qualities,” said Remus, though whatever those were he could no longer really fathom, and he knew Remus wouldn’t illuminate the cold chewed-out blank spaces for him. At their ankles their legs were still tangled and Remus had stretched an arm halfway across his chest, drumming his knuckles along the ridge of Sirius’s collarbone; his own arm had somehow wound around Remus’s shoulder blades like it had been drawn there on its own invincible orbit, nowhere else he could ever be. Often they did this at night, in the car or hotel beds or in the tent sharing one of the big fringed blankets Remus had bought in America in the ‘80s, fingers in the buttons of their spines or their hips, armfuls of each other, belly-ful, soul-ful, head-ful, searching; mornings he woke with Remus’s breath at his pulse and a mouthful of his hair, dreaming of spidery wraith-hands like mouths unbraiding his soul from his body like a nightmare version of the Rembrandt painting until he opened his eyes and watched at where Remus was tracing an intricate tattoo on his bicep or the back of his hand, snaking a quiet arm around his waist, their voices very soft with shared laughter in the liminal slice of airspace between them—a kind of mental overlap. Locked up inside themselves, pawing fucking desperately at each other’s cages. Feeling angry and enthralled and sleepy-drunk Sirius thought he should probably say something about this, like, you’ve never done anything but leave me high and dry and I keep letting you, and what is this supposed to be, and maybe don’t fucking do something if you’re going to be too afraid to talk about it later, then realized he was a hypocrite and a liar, first in rapid succession, and then cyclically. So he never did.

“My old record player is probably still there,” said Sirius, “along with a lot of other things I was too stupid to take at the time.”

“You never did return my copy of _Lust for Life_.”

“I’ll buy you a new one when we go to the record store tomorrow. I’ll buy you a fucking cottage at the bottom of the world if that’s what it takes.”

“Ta, Pads, but I’d rather have some pot and some curry. Besides I’m attached to the view.”

“So would I.”

“Everyone likes to think they’re easy to please.”

“God, yes, and no one really is, I get it. You’ve never had a single emotional moment in your life you didn’t run over with an eighteen-wheeler before you let even the slightest thing slip because then you’d have to throw yourself into the sea.”

“I wasn’t aware we were having a moment.”

Sirius laughed at the absurdity of it, the loud barking unlaugh that made him think of drought-withered cedars. “Sorry, um, I’m not sure we were either now that I think about it. I’m not really sure of anything except under my feet and that sometimes I’d like to be very far away from you because it’s easier. But it’s also worse, and anyway we’re here now, so there’s not much else to do but learn to live with it.”

“That’s—it’s weird but that’s nearly what I felt like, sometimes, for twelve or thirteen years. And I thought it’d get better, having you here again, but it feels—I don’t know. Like I’m not sure I haven’t always felt this way, or that you weren’t always the Bertha Mason living in my own head for three-quarters of my life,” said Remus. His voice was as thin as the end of the day, reedy-soft. “Back then the question was always at the back of my mind like a fucking record skipping straight to you every time, you know, if he could do this—”

“—Then what could I do?” Against his shoulder he felt Remus nod. “I’m not sure how to even get to the bottom of it, if there even is a bottom, but to tell you the truth I’m more interested in the problem than the solution. Most of the time it feels more like running in circles, only you don’t realize it until you’ve already gone a few laps. You want some more whiskey?”

“Please,” said Remus, “both our heads are going to be hanging out the window or taking turns in a toilet tomorrow,” and after he took a long drink he wrapped his hand around Sirius’s wrist again, thumbing the pulse below like a Morse distress signal, dot-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot. “I think you forgot I’m a bad drunk.”  
“I’ve never been much fun either. Usually I make myself miserable and write letters I burn in the morning, you know, in between the puking and the dizzy bodily throbbing. Or I say things I wish I could burn.”

“That is—that’s a good way of putting it.”

“There’s _Brevis obliviate_ for the small stuff but it kind of, you know, still has a tendency to deep-fry people. And besides I’d need it for myself too.”

“Doesn’t it feel like we’re going in the wrong direction? I mean obviously you were right,” said Remus, laughing brittly, “you were right all along. Go on and act smug about it like I know you want to.”

“No, that’s you. You’re the one who gets smug and superior even when you’re wrong. I was only ever that insufferable after I got laid or hexed a Death Eater.”

“Christ, you’re such a liar. You’re also bad when you’re very stoned.”

“Yes well, that’s my element,” said Sirius. At the closed window of the tent a moth was throwing itself against the canvas where the heady glow of the lantern split open the night-fog; it sounded sad, and thwarted, and full of suicidal, idiotic hope. “What I’m saying is I don’t feel good about it and I wish I’d tried harder to, I don’t know, what even can we do about any of it at this point? Delay the inevitable, I guess.”

“Not hard enough. Not as much as I wish.”

“Maybe not. But sometimes I think—you have to go back to the beginning before you can ever get anywhere again. Where all the ladders start.”

“God. Fuck you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. The tape had stopped playing after the end of the last track and so he tried to disguise the sharp intake of his breath and the clench of his jaw as anything other than what it was, but of course Remus could tell: he was trying not to cry too, Sirius could feel it in the tight-throat tension strung through the wires of his body, dense and choking heaviness beating into the open chambers of his heart. “I’m—”

“Stop apologizing to me. It’s alright. I told you ages ago it’s alright.”

“Ages ago you also told me you were over a lot of things. And that you liked my cooking.”

“I do like your cooking, you just get ideas above your station sometimes and I never wanted to break your heart.”

“I’ll remember that next time you’re bitching about something.” Quickly on the heels of an impulse he couldn’t name he slid his hand down Remus’s arm from his shoulders to tangle their fingers together and squeezed tight. “We should get breakfast somewhere really greasy in the morning. I’ll even be Snape for you all day if you want.”

“You make it sound like some kind of sick kink.”

“ _You_ did! And I’m not convinced by your protests either, by the way. And if we’re also being completely honest here it’s the first and last time any man is ever going to say that to you, so it’s more like a proposal if we’re getting technical.”

“For better or for worse,” said Remus. On his lips Sirius could see his smile a fraction before it truly spread; like this he looked twenty-one again, or eighteen. “It probably is the worst.”

“We’re going to blow all the money Dumbledore gave us on pot and a ton of food and maybe go to the beach,” said Sirius. “It’s not the worst.”

“There must be a reason,” said Remus, “Sirius—” but then he trailed off and didn’t finish, which was alright; wasn’t he thinking the same impossible things, after all? Their eternal pilgrimage, the indestructible mantra: Why did we ever leave each other? Why do we keep coming back to each other? Is this, too, symphonically mandated by something other than ourselves? Was I born with some miraculous piece of you stranded inside me, inseparable as magic, exquisite and improbable as life, yearning always for consummation, stirring my blood?

Who could even say?

“Rewind it,” he said, tugging their hands towards the Walkman, their palms clasped together in a kiss, “let’s rewind it. I want to hear it from the start again.”

In his left ear pressed to Remus’s ear he could hear the slow chant of the canal and the nightbirds calling like the hands of a clock, counting time; this close he could almost imagine it was coming from their bodies, from this sliver of the world that was theirs alone, from this thing that had taken root so long ago, this thing they had bled for and hurt for and screamed and starved and begged and crawled on their knees for. This thing they had crossed land and sea and death and exile and years and years to find again. This thing Sirius loved against all odds, or perhaps because of them. As if he could ever do anything else. As if he had ever wanted to.

Later it would rain again; he could smell the stormy coolness of it drifting with the mourning-clamor of the honeysuckle and the soft green chorus of the trees in the wind, longing fine as crystal or a blade, like saying goodbye. Together they closed their eyes and Sirius caught like a scent a ribbon of pure joyous memory jangling up his body and then into Remus’s in a familiar out-of-tune chord: the dusty-warm floorboards of the Shrieking Shack at sun-break, the sound of the stag’s hooves on the new grass below, their laughter—their holy laughter like a nighttime echo through the forest, tangling like ivy-vines, their souls which were larger and older than themselves and the world, free as God, vast, their footprints tracked through the mud like any other creature, their miraculous cartography into the unknown, their entire exalted history of all things lost and found, every unspoken and uncertain yearning, every loving, tearing, sobbing pain, every dream, every fear, every foray into the blinding and directionless dark together, every possibility in the places where their fingers were threaded through and trembling, where there was nothing but sacred memory, nothing but touch and feeling and truth, where they had come at last in the wild velvet woods to understand each other. Here you are, Sirius thought. Here you are, Moony. Here we are.

He thought Remus said something, or maybe he did, sweet like rain, bright greenblue summertime coda, something drawn from pure invincible memory, hours, dusklight, dreaming. Beside him someone else was singing: “I need to know, where does it go? How do I get there, and what will I find?”

—

On a country road, near the northern border of Oxfordshire with the windows open to the cloudless blaze of the midafternoon sky, they stopped to listen to the hissing static on the radio shot through with bad news just before they had to turn onto the main road. Unspeaking Sirius took a long breath and wrapped his hand around Remus’s wrist where it was hovering at the gear stick, his thumb stroking down his wrist-bone and into the atlas of veins and scars while they watched the swallows dive down into the unturned fields; there was no roadmap for universal time—for their time, he supposed, with a strange spinal frisson, and in their time they always came back. The earth would spin and the galaxy would rotate and everything in all of creation would expand and someday they would go west again, or somewhere else entirely, and given enough time he’d walk through the weeping willows and up the lane in Somerset again, and Remus would already have the door open, and Sirius’s toothbrush would still be there, and all the air he had breathed, and the record player where Remus would probably be playing “Fall in Love With Me” or “Grounded” depending on his mood, and the apples would be falling off the trees, and in the night they would go out to the garden and let the rain soak them through like an exorcising of demons, rabid and cauterizing. They would walk through the forest and the Black Lake and part each other’s bed curtains and spend late nights at James and Lily’s and wander Regent’s Canal and fall asleep exhausted with joy on the couch together in Camden. They would always. They would always.

Remus turned his hand around and pressed their palms together, linking their fingers; they were so close. They had always been so close. Then he tugged once, twice, and let go, hands back on the wheel, and turned onto the narrow road arching deep into the east, into London, where the hills rose up and burned into the sky, where some other bleary broken-off piece of them was waiting, just out of sight.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Pavement's vital and immortal [Gold Soundz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3UJ_BWL-ZQ), which I'd initially planned to have them listening to while having a few Shattering Realizations that weren't in the cards for them this time around! But really I was more inspired by _Brighten the Corners_ as I was writing this, which is stupidly beautiful, and--in my opinion--their most exquisitely sad: [I trust you will tell me if I am making a fool of myself.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO7P6vXbnok)


End file.
